Birmingham barbershop meets the Folies-Bergère: Hurvin Anderson’s Salon Paintings, at the Hepworth Wakefield, reviewed

There’s a nice irony to the title Salon Paintings when the salon in question is a barbershop, an irony that won’t be lost on Hurvin Anderson. Born to Jamaican parents in Birmingham in 1965 and trained at Wimbledon and the Royal College at a time when the Euston Road School discipline of measured observation was still being taught in English art schools, Anderson is steeped in the European painting tradition. Explaining the fascination of the mirrored interior of the Birmingham barbershop that first inspired the series of paintings in his exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield – begun in 2006 and completed this year – he compares it to Manet’s ‘Bar at the Folies-Bergère’: the barbershop as the Caribbean equivalent of the impressionist café.

That’s where any obvious parallel with impressionism ends. Although Anderson’s Caribbean landscapes can be impressionistically painted, the Barbershop series takes its cue from collage. It’s no accident that Richard Hamilton and Patrick Caulfield are among the modern British artists he has selected for an accompanying display; he shares their fondness for the sharp edge.

Anderson’s mirrored barbershops are battlegrounds between figuration and abstraction in which the empty chairs and counter exist in real space while the photos of sporting and political heroes on the walls, reflected in the glass, recede kaleidoscopically into infinity. There’s always a push-me-pull-you between flatness and depth in his work and in this series the flatness is winning. But the miniature skylines of bottles and jars of pomade on the counter are reminiscent of still lifes by Morandi. A part of him wants to draw you in with authentic detail, inviting you to put on the cape, sit in the chair and choose your style from the menu on the wall: Fade, Flat Top, High Top, Side Part, Trim Shave, Skiffle.