From Hogarth to Thatcher: Lubaina Himid's A Fashionable Marriage (1986)

Lecture Series – Elizabeth Robles

6 May 2021
3:00 pm
This is the fifth lecture in the seven-part series titled, Artist in Focus: William Hogarth.
Online

In this lecture, Elizabeth Robles investigates Hogarth’s enduring legacy through the lens of Turner-prize winner Lubaina Himid’s A Fashionable Marriage. A re-staging of The Toilette, the fourth of six scenes that comprise Hogarth’s Marriage-a-la-Mode, here Himid cuts Hogarth’s painted figures away from the canvas to create a plastic tableau vivant of the London scene in the 1980s. She negotiates an engagement with Hogarth as a fellow artist, a satirist and a proponent of a myth of Britishness and the art histories that accrue to it.

About the speaker

Elizabeth Robles is a researcher and lecturer in contemporary art in the History of Art Department at the University of Bristol. She is particularly interested in the formation of ideas around ‘black art’ across the twentieth century and is currently a British Academy postdoctoral fellow working on a project entitled Making Waves: Black Artists & ‘Black Art’ in Britain from 1962–1982. Most recently she co-edited the exhibition publication The Place is Here: The Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain (Sternberg, 2019) alongside curator Nick Aikens. She also co-leads the British Art Network Black British Artists Research Group.