Lubaina Himid’s full-length standing figures, along with her strategies for arranging objects and spaces, are typically rendered in an interactive and immersive register. Foregrounded with the care of a stage set, this approach centers Black figures and, particularly in her recent work, prototypical representatives of various professions. This painting practice, composed of figures that appear to have paused and frozen in place, is in fact quietly concerned with the circumstances of migrant individuals shaped by racial, gender, and class divisions, those whose stories rarely surface in historical narratives. Almost all of them are products of a gaze associated with dark and dramatic concerns: figures striving to adapt to their surroundings yet still feeling excluded, strangely dimensionless and transient.

predicting history: testing translation

In her latest exhibition at the British Pavilion of the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Lubaina Himid operates within this same framework. She constructs a space of reflection that negotiates the question of non-belonging through twenty-six questions, narrating a world that belongs to those whose existence is deemed problematic and whose presence is registered as out of place. She builds a scale of characters defined through the belonging of bodies, including Architects, Boatbuilders, Tailors, Chefs, and Gardeners. She gives dramatic expression to the psychological transformations experienced on the threshold of adapting to a new environment, while keeping alive an expectation oriented toward coexistence.

Architects (2025), one of the most prominent works in the exhibition, follows a compositional flow that brings together figures and religious structures symbolizing the powerful and fraught relationship between systems of belief and history. This balanced triptych depicts the moment of an encounter between two figures. Through the mediation of an estranged image, Himid reaches here toward a flat, elegant, and naturalistic plane of interpretation. The similarly structured composition Tailors is likewise built around two Black figures who, appearing within an interval of pattern and balance, embody the particular knowledge and agency characteristic of the tailor’s trade. Within a figurative pattern unified by colorful and abstract decorative elements in the background, chromatic fields placed in contrast lend a more dynamic energy to what appears an otherwise still depiction. The monumental composition Chefs (2025), also from the same year, is a compelling painting that shapes, with a dimension of humor, the cultural things that Black people have carried and brought with them. Two symmetrically positioned panels here elevate the rhythmic working dynamic of two chef figures placed side by side beyond a surface level of content, carrying it toward a more immanent plane of meaning. Similarly, Boatbuilders and Gardeners are caught between dramatic disclosure and direct presentation, compelling the viewer to turn toward in-between positions and states.

The feeling of not belonging is, without question, a complex and profound social problem concerning the emotional and societal status of people. What Himid’s paintings foreground is precisely this sense of deep unease and disillusionment in the face of a precarious world. Focused on a dark reality despite their bright colors and decorative quality, these paintings seek, within a calm narrative order, to make the hardships caused by the trauma of displacement felt in their full weight. The depicted professionals are perhaps, for this very reason, like people who are aware of their provisional position and who, at a moment of indecision and at a cautious distance, find themselves adrift within an ongoing dispute. The unease, the sense of distance, and the tension they experience in moments of meeting, encounter, or work naturally intensify the dramatic density of expression.

an ironic and realist approach

To summarize, Lubaina Himid operates within an ironic and realist approach that successfully renews the tradition of painting. At times appearing tranquil and serene, her depictions rapidly evolve toward a dark and melancholic register in pursuit of a critical and humorous intensity that transcends the rhetoric of the Black figure. These paintings, which evoke concepts such as identity, migration, belonging, and difference, are thus filled with narratives dedicated to the unbearable difficulties of coexistence and living together.