Anderson received a bachelor's degree in painting from Wimbledon School of Art and was mentored by George Blacklock and John Mitchell.
[3] His paintings and works on paper "depict places where memory and history converge"[3] and engage with issues of identity and representation.
[4] While works such as Studio Drawing 15 (2016) mark a shift toward abstraction in his oeuvre, the motifs of the barbershop, densely layered trees, and Caribbean landscapes have been consistently featured throughout most of his career.
Anderson is known for painting lush and loosely rendered observations of scenes and spaces loaded with personal meaning.
He bases his artwork on vintage and contemporary photographs of the British and Caribbean landscapes, which he uses to express ideas on the colonial histories of countries.
At times, Anderson places Jamaican and Caribbean greenery within British landscapes to explore the history of colonial societies extracting and cultivating plants from colonized countries for their own use.
He experiments with the markers of identity in both contemporary Britain and the Caribbean, as well as the socio-cultural effects of the expanded colonial world.
In 2024, the solo exhibition Hurvin Anderson: Passenger Opportunity at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, United States, revolved around a new large-scale series of a sixteen-panel paintings.
Curated by Franklin Sirmans, the works in the exhibition draw inspiration from the murals of Jamaican artist Carl Abrahams in the departures area of Jamaica’s Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston.