Stages
Lubaina Himid
30 July – 9 August 2025
By Appointment (Monday – Friday): 11 August – 3 September
Lubaina Himid’s Plan B series consists of paintings which reflect on time spent as an artist-in-residence at Tate St Ives from 1998 to 1999. Each work is coupled as two canvases, often bisected by a modernist use of colour. One canvas is inscribed with writing and paired with another canvas depicting imaginary communal interior spaces – variously populated by chairs, clocks and ladders as well as isolated windows with views of the sea. The title of the series, Plan B, evokes a sense of event – its secondary nature suggesting that Plan A failed or did not take place. The evocations of the ‘plan’ are multiple: as an itinerary to conjure a set of representations; as cartographic, strategic or schematic; as a draft or spatial projection upon a two-dimensional surface sketching a speculative, hidden or familiar space.
Text by Dorothy Price: A Sense of Place: Lubaina Himid and the Sea
Installation views. Photo: Eva Herzog
Havana Nightschool (Plan B), 1999, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 244 x 2 cm
The Glare of the Sun (Plan B), 1999, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 244 x 2 cm
Our Entire Food Supply (Plan B), 1999, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 244 x 2 cm
The Sharp Undergrowth (Plan B), 1999, acrylic on canvas, 122 x 244 x 2 cm