One of my favourite works by Lubaina Himid is comparatively modest. Man in a Shirt Drawer (2017-18) juts from the wall like a fragment of junk shop furniture – you have to approach sideways to see a painting there at all. It is art that literally forces you to adopt a certain position to step into its space.
When you do, what you find is a meditative portrait of a handsome man with lips the pink of carnations and lemony-yellow light bouncing off his eyelids. It is painted inside a wooden drawer, becoming a secret to be cached out of site then greedily consumed in private.
Like much of Himid’s work, it asks what kinds of people are visible in paintings, which figures are named and which are not, and who the audience might be.
We don’t know this man’s name. He could be someone’s lover; he might be gay in a time or place where that could not be open knowledge; he could stand for the millions of black men of history whose names and faces went unrecorded.
Himid was trained first in set design: she considers your body in the art gallery. Her Tate show is conceived as if a theatre stage that we share with her artworks (though alas often from the other side of barriers).
In many of Himid’s paintings – such as the series Le Rodeur (2015-17) – the richly dressed characters appear pressed so close to us that we seem to occupy the space of the picture with them.
Some works take to the floor like actors. A Fashionable Marriage (1986) adapts the dramatis personae of William Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode: The Toilette in a series of outsized collage cut-outs.
To one side, the apartheid-supporting Margaret Thatcher flirts with a bellicose, cruise-missile-sprouting Ronald Reagan. To the other, a ridiculous fop (the art critic…) warbles in a coat collaged from art magazines, above a cravat made from rubber gloves, while a white feminist artist listens attentively.
In the foreground, a young black woman (a servant boy in Hogarth’s original) rolls her eyes and schools herself from a stash of political books.
There are no interpretative texts; instead Himid has inscribed the gallery walls with leading questions: “We live in clothes, we live in buildings – do they fit us?”; “How do you distinguish safety from danger?”; “What happens next?”
Himid, who won the Turner Prize in 2017 and was made a CBE in 2018, has been active as an artist, curator and educator since the 1980s. While there are works here from across her career, she has treated the show as an airy survey rather than a comprehensive retrospective.
Himid is also, pointedly and politically, a sharer of platforms. In the 1980s she curated and promoted the work of other black women artists, and she has more recently used the clout of her Turner Prize win to invite galleries showing her work to cast a critical eye over the rest of their programmes. She has shared this show with the Polish-born sound artist Magda Stawarska-Beavan.
This is one aspect of the show I was less convinced by – the sound elements often seem simplistic compared to the rich, open-ended paintings.
Perhaps the experience will be different in a gallery thronged with people, where the recordings compete with ambient noise and perhaps become more subliminal. Bringing sound into a gallery may make the space more inviting: these temples to art can echo forbiddingly.
The show begins in the atrium with painted flags based on Tanzanian kangas, bordered picture cloths featuring short mottos. In the first gallery, small paintings exploit health and safety instructions for anthropomorphic double-entendres: “Give warning of undue stress”, “Keep moving parts lubricated”.
A table nearby shows a “proposal” for monuments in Liverpool, which are in fact painted Victorian jelly moulds. Visually it is a joke of scale – the moulds produce desserts that resemble buildings in miniature – but it is bittersweet, reflecting a taste for sugar from the West Indies.
They are objects made beautiful with pattern and portraits evoking the people and textiles of Africa and the Caribbean, but they carry a thematic kick – hybrid objects addressed with a potent mix of humour and politics are a Himid specialty.
A line of blue border patterns plunders decorative traditions from around the world: this strip of paint marches around a room like a conquering army, across an unruly rabble of objects including a book, a shopping bag, a pianola roll, cardboard packaging and bits of musical instruments.
Later, we encounter old wooden handcarts, their bases painted with fish and insects, and migrants and castaways – travelling players moving unseen.
Although she grew up in London, Himid was born in Zanzibar, and has spent much of her career thinking about the transatlantic slave trade and diaspora.
The sea is present throughout the show. The sound of waves and creaking timbers leaks from Old Boat/New Money (2019) a sculpture made of freestanding timbers in shades of greenish blue, angled to evoke a wave.
They are painted with cowrie shells – an ancient form of currency – forming an abstraction of a ship carrying valuable cargo. As with the diamond pattern Himid uses to evoke waves, the work feels like a process of unlearning. How would you represent being in a ship on the ocean if you had never seen a boat or the sea?
The penultimate gallery is rich with the zippy colours that saturate Himid’s large paintings. In every canvas black figures interact with one another in enigmatic, often affectionate ways. Their costumes come from different periods and places, and their locations are non-specific.
Many feature suspended pulleys: they could be for a washing line, sails on a boat, or the raising and lowering of scenery. We are reminded of the artifice of painting: some characters dissolve into the background; one is left as unfilled lines like the invisible man (a poignant reference). Characters and compositions are borrowed from Hogarth and James Tissot.
After all that lushness and affection, the closing gallery is a rude shock, like the house lights abruptly coming up. The closing work is a utilitarian bike shed and smoking shelter with “Do you want to live an easy life?” daubed on it like graffiti.
The question is double-edged. It is a call back to the start of the show: if you want to live an easy life, like the black architects and tailors in Himid’s paintings, you need to design a world that fits your needs.
The easy life can be the one lived in ignorance, which does not probe, protest or push back. Sure, you could lead an easy life, but at what cost?
Lubaina Himid is at Tate Modern until 3 July 2022 (tate.org.uk)
