Himid and Stawarska Float Nine Paintings Through Lisson Street

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 06, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Himid and Stawarska Float Nine Paintings Through Lisson Street At a Glance Cross-town — Himid and Stawarska float nine 1999 diptychs through Lisson Street on a 38-minute soundtrack, and the hang, not the paintings, is the event. Walk into Lisson Street right now and the painting s aren’t where painting s usually are. Not flat against the wall. Nine diptychs hang out in the room itself, floating, anchored by colourful cuboid forms and recurring zigzag patterns, while a 38-minute score plays through the space. This is “Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska: Zanzibar,” open from June 4 to August 22, landing right on London Gallery Weekend. The gallery sets out the structure plainly. The show “comprises nine diptychs painted by Himid in 1999, paired with a 38-minute multi-layered ‘libretto’ composed by Stawarska in 2023.” Himid is the painter most people know for cut-out figures and narrative; these 1999 canvases are described, rightly, as “an anomalous passage of abstract painting .” A 27-year-old detour, brought back out and staged as something new. Why floating the canvases changes what a painter sees A painting is composed to be seen one way: frontally, at a roughly fixed distance, against a quiet wall that sets it off. The wall is part of the work even though nobody paints it. Take the canvas off the wall and float it in the room and that whole contract changes. There’s no ground behind it now. The edges show. The viewer walks around it instead of standing at it, so light reaches it from more than one side instead of arriving as a single controlled wash. A floated painting loses its wall and gains a room. That’s the move here, and it does something specific to nine separate diptychs. Spread flat across walls, they’d read as a series, one after another. Floated and anchored by those cuboid forms, they stop being nine things and become one thing you move through. The room is doing the composition the wall usually does. A critic will tell you what’s in the paintings. What a painter notices walking in is that the hang has quietly turned a series into a single spatial work. The 38-minute libretto puts your looking on a clock The other intervention is time. Standing at a canvas, the one variable entirely in the viewer’s control is dwell time, how long the eye gets to slow down and let the slow information surface. Pair the floated paintings with a 38-minute composed score and the room takes that control back. The looking gets paced by Stawarska’s clock, not the viewer’s. For a painter that’s the boldest decision in the show: it overrides the single most painterly variable in the room. Whether the sound serves these quiet 1999 abstraction s or competes with them is the live question, and it’s exactly why this is a see-in-person show. The float and the score are the work; a photograph keeps neither. That’s the reclassification at the heart of it. Floating, scoring, and timing the canvases to coincide with the British Pavilio