Harris Gallery & Museum 1997
Venetian Maps is a series of nine large works on canvas, mingling memory and loss, fragments and echoes. Venice is a city of secrets, boats and mysteries, tales of love. Beneath the murky waters lie thousands of precious objects lost, stolen, forgotten and abandoned over centuries. They reveal the narrative of numerous liaisons, countless mistaken identities. Layered traces of the African presence and the Jewish ghetto are celebrated in these paintings along with fragments of paintings by Pietro Longhi and Vittore Carpaccio. Navigating the city is exhilarating and confusing, familiarity is the best guide for no two maps are the same.
Venetian Maps is a series of nine new canvases. The artist mingles memory and loss, discovery and attainment with a clarity of purpose and boldness of colour. Venice is one of those rare locations where the actuality of the place exceeds your wildest imagination. No stranger to the place could ever forget their first sighting. Whether you visit in the often foggy days of Carnivale or the bustling open days of the Biennale when the international art world descends like a host of locusts the place is never quiet; however there are always places to escape, where solitude may take the place of bustle, or company may be sought should sexual intrigue seek resolution.
Layered traces of the African presence in the cosmopolitan territory which is Venice are rightfully celebrated in Lubaina Himid’s Venetian Maps.
From Lubaina Himid: Venetian Maps exhibition catalog
Lubaina Himid: Venetian Maps is an Altitude International Arts Touring Exhibition