Invite relating to an exhibition, 1993
Published by: Royal Festival Hall
Year published: 1993
Unpaginated.

Postcard sized (A6) foldout card/full colour print, image on front, text on inside panels/invitation produced by the gallery

Text on inside panel is as follows: Lubaina Himid | Revenge a masque in five tableaux. You are invited to the private view on Monday 26 April 1993. Exhibition runs 27th April - 6th June, Foyer galleries, Royal Festival Hall, London SE1.

Handwritten amongst the typed text is the following: “Eddie, If you ever come to London to look at art - come to this, Lubaina.” Cover image: Lubaina Himid, Between the Two, 1992. On the other inside panel is a descriptive text by the artist that relates to the image on the invitation: “Two women standing ankle-deep behind banners in front of cloths shredding maps; fragments float away.”

In time, the work would be described as follows: “Between the Two My Heart is Balanced is a reconception of a work by French painter James Tissot (1836-1902), which depicts two European women in a boat with a soldier. One woman is ignored, while the other holds the attention of the soldier. In Himid’s version, two women of African descent appear without the soldier’s presence. Swathed in African fabric, the women hold each other’s attention as a visible trail materializes in the boat’s wake. Himid’s boldly eloquent , painterly style is skillfully employed in her complex historical revisions. The stunning Revenge series might be viewed as an elegy for those lost during the Middle Passage, whose histories have been ignored, as well as a celebration of those who continue to survive.” Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd, on Revenge (page 34 of London Bridge: Late Twentieth Century British Art and the Routes of ‘National Culture’, chapter in Transforming the Crown: African, Asian & Caribbean Artists in Britain 1966-1996, Caribbean Cultural Center, New York, 1997, pp. 16 - 45).

The Tissot painting referred to by Beauchamp-Byrd is Portsmouth Dockyard (c. 1877). Both the Tissot painting, and this Himid painting figured in the Tate exhibition of 2012, Migrations.