A solo exhibition of new work by Lubaina Himid featuring overpainted objects and furniture.
Hollybush Gardens is pleased to present Barricades, a solo exhibition of new work by Lubaina Himid featuring overpainted objects and furniture which have been integral to her practice for the past three decades, including found wooden drawers, doors, a table, a shelf and a set of oars, alongside a large-scale abstract painting and work on paper. The title of the exhibition refers to a barricade as a means of protection or escape, and also the impetus to ‘make do and mend’, to improvise or repurpose objects and structures close at hand in times of need.
Barricades includes a group of works which expand on Himid’s ongoing Men in Drawers series, begun in 2014–15, in which found or discarded drawers are repurposed as supports for painted portraits of individual Black figures and act as containers for lost and forgotten lives. Himid writes: ‘The drawers tell the story of people in search of home who constantly have to move in order to find it and as a result leave traces of themselves behind each time they leave a particular place.’
In The Architects, a heavy drawing table with its top removed is suspended from the wall, projecting outwards into the gallery to reveal two painted drawers, becoming ‘a moving puppet-theatre-like object in which the drawers move back and forth to enable a conversation between the protagonists’.
For Five Conversations, a commission for the High Line, New York (2019), here a series of four roughly sawn and stripped half doors salvaged from a skip are hinged to the wall and hung in a row. Reminiscent of stable doors, the works have an improvisational quality and function as temporary blockades, reflecting on thresholds as a space of welcome and refusal. In Kitchen Door, a grid of colourful and patterned ribbons are threaded from real and drawn hooks along the top of the door to form a makeshift window. In Counting Room, Utility Room and Mucky Door, the lower halves of the doors are drawn on and over painted with images of makeshift utensils with idiosyncratic functional qualities.
Himid’s diptych The Greendales Bird Sellers develops from her recent series of paintings of Street Sellers (2023), which depict lone vendors plying their particular wares. Two full length portraits of women facing one another wearing vibrantly coloured outfits, each holding a caged bird, are painted atop panelled wardrobe doors with glass handles; an elongated, linen canvas with cross hatch motifs occupies the space between them.
Another Broken Heart is a large-scale painting with an unprimed linen canvas appendage featuring a form reminiscent of a human heart, mixing palette or map, with a series of elliptical forms oscillating in the foreground. Movement through and across bodies of water is a recurring theme throughout Himid’s practice. Here, six wooden oars, some unusually long, with variously shaped blades, all smooth from years of immersion, are hung horizontally on the gallery wall.
Himid’s overpainted objects, removed from their original context, assume new identities within the gallery space – she sets the scene for the viewer to interact, stepping in between dislocated doors, discovering hidden drawers and the patterned underside of an everyday shelf. She notes: ‘The ability to make something that can be moved or which itself changes or triggers a reaction or shifts the perception of something else is at the heart of what I do.
Lubaina Himid: Barricades: 1 November – 20 December 2024
Hollybush Gardens 1-2 Warner Yard London EC1R 5EY
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 11am - 6pm; or by appointment.
Further Information: Hollybush Gardens