Denzil Hurley

Published by CANADA and Inventory Press
Designed by IN-FO.CO
12 x 9 inches
210 pages

Denzil Hurley was a long-underrecognized artist, whose intellectual and aesthetic contributions have been influential in the art world throughout his career. Born in Barbados in 1949, Hurley was an impactful educator, spending most of his teaching career at the University of Washington.

Published in tandem with a solo exhibition of his work at CANADA, this book is the first major publication on Hurley. With essays by Gervais Marsh, Robert Storr, and Wallace Whitney that consider the breadth of the artist’s achievement, this book 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 creates a sense of improvisation and structural integrity. The paintings potentially act as stand-ins for human relationships and build their own contexts. Hurley’s work is alive with materiality and thought; illuminating the artist’s musings on the limits of language.