The Sunday Times - UK (2021-11-28)

ART

L

ubaina Himid doesn’t

like me much. There

are plenty of good

reasons for that — at

least from her point of

view. In the past I’ve

been snippy about her work.

I’m a middle-aged white man,

her natural enemy. I’m

straight. And in recent years I

have shrieked loudly at the fall

from grace of the Turner prize,

an award she won in 2017.

Lots of reasons, then, for

her not only to mistrust my

opinions, but also to pinch my

nose should we ever meet.

Indeed, a while back on

Twitter she expressed a scary

enthusiasm to see me tossed

into the air by an angry bull

at a corrida, and to have my

pants ripped by its horns!

Ouch, ouch, ouch, squealed

my inner matador.

All of which makes me a

fearless and honest assessor

of her work. So if I say her

new show at Tate Modern is

thunderously impressive,

stirring, beautiful, bursting

with creativity, you know you

can trust me on this. There’s a

caveat, which we’ll come to

— an aesthetic problem I can’t

shake out of my reaction —

but it’s a small thing

compared with the

overall impact of this

powerful event.

The exhibition

isn’t really a

retrospective,

although some of the

older work here dates

to the 1980s. In those days

Himid was an aesthetic

activist determined to get

black art noticed by a white

art establishment that she

loathed. The art she made

then felt as if it was jabbing you

in the chest. Its chief subjects

— slavery, the crushing of

black identity, the dark power

of the sea — are still her chief

subjects, but what was once

explicit is nowadays implied.

The Tate show favours this

later approach and presents

us with an artist who is getting

better and better. We begin

with an array of colourful

flags hanging above one of

Tate Modern’s many foyers.

Made in 2018 and inspired,

I read, by east African Kanga

fabrics, the boldly patterned

banners, embroidered with

enigmatic words of wisdom,

bring something immediately

demotic and human to the

echoey concrete emptiness

of the Blavatnik Building.

“There could be an endless

ocean” reads a sad flag

dappled in blue and grey.

“How do you spell change?”

asks a brighter one in

red and gold. The colourful

folk art flutterings feel as if

they are challenging the

strict modernist

architecture that

surrounds them like

someone turning

up at a funeral in a

Hawaiian shirt. The

show beyond turns

out to be many things,

but one of them is definitely

an architectural critique of

Tate Modern itself: its

looming, inhuman

proportions; its hard,

masculine lines.

It’s quickly obvious as well

that things are going to get

noisy. As soon as you step

in you hear whispers and

groans. In the rooms ahead

the whispers turn into music.

And then into the sound of the

sea, whose relentless rolling

soaks into your thoughts and

makes everything feel as if it

is addressing the subject of

slavery, even when there’s no

obvious reason to think that.

The inventive noise

moments are collaborations

with Magda Stawarska-

Beavan, a sound artist with

whom Himid has been

working for a decade and

whose impact has obviously

been transformational. Most

of the best pieces in the show

have a sound element to them.

Metal Handkerchiefs is a set

of folky paintings of tools and

building materials of the sort

you might buy from B&Q —

saws, hammers, nails —

quintessential boy’s stuff that

brings joy to the DIY giant

lurking inside every bloke. By

painting them in unexpected

colours and surrounding

them with decorative frames,

Himid softens the masculinity

of the imagery and claims it

for the feminine side.

It’s an effect continued in

the readings from a health

Thunderouslyimpressivestirring

THE

CRITICS

Waldemar Januszczak never thought he would write such

words about Lubaina Himid, only the fourth living British

artist to have been given a retrospective at Tate Modern

Lubaina Himid

In 2021 she became the

second black British artist,

the first British woman

and the fifth Turner

prizewinner to be

granted a retrospective

at Tate Modern.

Steve McQueen

In 2020 the Oscar-winning

director and Turner-winning

artist squeezed a concise

retrospective into Tate

Modern just as the first

Covid wave was about

to hit.

Damien Hirst

In 2012, to coincide with the

London Olympics, Hirst

brought live butterflies, dead

flies and chunks of raw beef

into Bankside in what was

then the best-attended

Tate Modern show.

Gilbert & George

In 2007 they became the first locals to be

allowed in when their huge retrospective —

modestly entitled Gilbert & George:

Major Exhibition — packed the

gallery with

seemingly

endless

quantities of

their work.

BRIT SHOWS AT TATE MODERN

GETTY IMAGES/PA TATE © LUBAINA HIMID

20 28 November 2021