Before you know what her work means, you have already felt it. That is entirely the point.
Start with the color.
That is what most people do, whether they intend to or not. You walk into a room containing Lubaina Himid’s paintings and the first thing that happens is not intellectual — it is sensory, almost physical. Plush pinks, muted yellows, sunset oranges, midnight blues: the palette floods the room before you have read a single label, before you have understood a single thing.Critics have reached for the word “jewel-toned” so often it has become a cliché, which is a shame, because it is accurate. Her canvases do not merely contain color — they radiate it, the way stained glass does, transforming whatever light exists in a room into something slightly more generous than it was before.
This is, it turns out, a deeply considered decision. As the poet and critic Fred Moten has observed, Himid’s “celebration in, and of, color” reinforces her seriousness of purpose, becoming “the ultimate solemnity.”That formulation is worth dwelling on. Solemnity achieved through celebration. Weight carried in brightness. It is a paradox that runs through everything she makes — and it is, perhaps, the most honest account of what distinguishes her from artists who address similar histories through similar means.
A Formal Language Built from Everywhere
Some of Himid’s paintings draw from textile traditions, including finely observed fashion details and the vivid meshes of woven cloth; others turn to interiors, furniture, and the architectonic structures of the built environment.She is not a painter who works from a single source. Her visual references sprawl deliberately across centuries and continents — Hogarth’s satirical engravings, East African kanga fabrics, Dutch batik, decorative lineages from across the globe — and she folds them together without apology, because her argument is precisely that these traditions belong to the same world, have always belonged to the same world, even when that world preferred to keep them separate.
She works on an unusually wide range of surfaces: canvas, ceramic, wood, found furniture — often producing objects and sculptures with performative elements. In Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service (2007), she painted the faces of enslaved people onto traditional china, making visible that they, too, had been treated as commodities — their presence hidden in plain sight, enigmatic and insistent. The material choice is never incidental. When you paint a face onto a dinner plate, you are asking the person who holds that plate exactly what they think they are doing.
Her installation Blue Grid Test (2020) demonstrates the same principle at architectural scale. She encircled an entire room with an eye-level row of ordinary objects — newspaper, banjo, cardboard box, headboard, wall clock, paper shopping bag — painting across their surfaces a continuous strip of patterns in various shades of blue, sixty-four in total, each sourced from a decorative tradition somewhere in the world, each a portal to a different past. The effect is that of a horizon line — oceanic, endless, and quietly vertiginous. You are standing inside a world that is larger than the room.
The Empty Chair
Trained in theatre design, Himid’s works contain interactive and immersive dimensions, whether through her free-standing cut-out paintings, installation choices, or compositional strategies that invite viewers’ participation. In her Strategy Paintings series (2022–23), she paints fictional characters seated around tables, often leaving an empty chair for viewers to imagine themselves occupying. “You see that there is a political gap,” she has said, “in which you can situate yourself, and sometimes an actual space in the canvas.”
That empty chair is one of the more precise formal gestures in contemporary painting. It does not demand sympathy from the viewer; it offers an invitation. And the distinction matters enormously, because sympathy positions the viewer above the work — looking down, feeling moved — whereas an invitation positions them inside it, implicated, responsible for deciding what happens next.
Approaching both picture frame and museum exhibition as opportunities for dramatic composition, Himid puts special pressure on the poses of her painted subjects — whether observing, assembling, embracing, or conversing — to convey meaning.Her figures lean toward each other. They confer, conspire, look sideways at the viewer with an expression that is not quite confrontation and not quite welcome but something more interesting than either. They suggest that a conversation is already underway, and that you have arrived slightly late.
Radical Optimism as Formal Choice
Here is where the form and the person become inseparable.
“I’m not in the business of making work where I repeat the trauma,” Himid has said plainly.This is a more radical statement than it first appears. The history her work engages — slavery, colonialism, institutional erasure, the systemic exclusion of Black artists from the Western canon — is not short on available anguish. There are other, entirely legitimate artistic responses to this material. Himid has simply chosen a different one.
She has identified not as a painter but as “a political strategist who uses a visual language to encourage conversation, argument, and change.”Strategy, not elegy. The distinction shapes everything: the color that arrives before comprehension, the empty chair that refuses pity, the jewel-toned scenes that seduce before they disturb. She has calculated that beauty is a more effective instrument of change than grief — that people will follow brightness into difficult places they would not enter if the door were marked with sorrow.
What she consistently offers is, in her own words, “a recognition of the rich and complicated contribution to the culture and the economy made by those who have come from somewhere else.”Not loss, but contribution. Not absence, but presence — presence that was always there and simply went unrecorded.
What Venice Will Inherit
When Himid transforms the British Pavilion in 2026, she will bring all of this with her: the color that hits before the idea, the surfaces that remember what institutions forget, the compositions that leave room for the viewer to decide. She has promised work that “resonates with multiple audiences, communicates with complex histories, and looks to a more collaborative future” — and given her track record, the operative word in that sentence is looks. The looking comes first. The thinking follows, willingly, because the looking was so beautiful it made the thinking feel possible.
That is the wager Lubaina Himid has been making her entire career: that joy is not the opposite of seriousness but its most durable form. Venice, in 2026, will find out whether she is right.
She almost certainly is.
Reporting and references include Artforum, Art21, Artnet, 4Columns, Burnaway, and Exhibition materials from Cristea Roberts Gallery.
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