Denzil Hurley

Denzil Hurley is a long-underrecognized Barbadian-American artist, whose artistic and intellectual underpinnings have been influential in the art world throughout his life. Published in tandem with an exhibition of his work at Canada, this book is the first major publication on Hurley.

Born in Barbados in 1949, Hurley was an impactful educator, spending most of his teaching career at the University of Washington. With essays by Gervais Marsh, Robert Storr, and Wallace Whitney that consider the breadth of the artist’s achievement, the catalogue focuses on Hurley’s final paintings, a mixture of reductive post-conceptual painting and provisional construction methods of the African diaspora. In his “stick” and “glyphs” series, Hurley's paintings create a sense of improvisation and structural integrity as well as act as stand-ins for human relationships. Always, Hurley’s paintings are alive with color, bringing light to the artist’s musings on the limits of language.