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Hurvin Anderson

When the British artist Hurvin Anderson was visiting one of his exhibitions with his family last year, his 5-year-old daughter made a picture of her own in the gallery. She drew a goldfish bowl, which Anderson took as a sign — a metaphor for being on display and under scrutiny.

That got him thinking about his four-decade-long relationship with the art world. “It’s interesting to a point,” he said recently. “But then after that, it’s not much fun.”

Success in the art market has bought Anderson a lot of attention. “Audition,” his 1998 painting of a swimming pool scene, fetched one of the highest prices ever for a painting by a living Black British artist when it sold at auction for more than $10 million in 2021. Last year, a piece called “Lower Lake” brought in almost $4.5 million at Christie’s.

Yet as a 61 year-old, married father of five, Anderson is still trying to figure out a balance between work and home life. There are days when he does the school run and other times when he is holed up for weeks in his purpose-built home studio in Cambridgeshire, England.

“We constantly want to have it all,” he said — “not sure it’s really possible.”