“I’m always nervous about the word identity,” Hurvin Anderson told The Guardian in 2023. “I try not to use it.” Born in 1965, to Jamaican parents in the U.K., Anderson’s art has long grappled, if obliquely, with questions of belonging. He is known for returning obsessively to the same subjects. For instance, in 2006 Anderson stumbled upon a barbershop in Birmingham, his hometown, and painted it in his signature idiom—assertive lines and bold blocks of color. He revisited the motif for the next 15 years, reworking it repeatedly, shifting from figuration to abstraction, and from an interior scene to something closer to portraiture. This Tate exhibition examines how Anderson uses composition and repetition to probe deeper themes—among them, the very word he is reluctant to name. —Elena Clavarino