Overview
'I like to think that my paintings are the antithesis of misrepresentation – the reclamation of the canvas by all the models, painters, wives, mistresses and performers. The spaces I depict are dream-like in the sense that they are fictional, but very much based on reality and lived, sensorial experience.'
South-African-born, London-based artist Lisa Brice challenges traditional representations of women in Western art history through her figurative painting practice. The female nude, depicted in Brice's signature cobalt blue, is reclaimed from a male gaze that seeks to disempower women as passive objects of desire. In individual and group portraits set in studios and bars, women are liberated from the roles of model and muse. They are shown interchangeably brandishing paint brushes, as they capture their own likenesses (and that of their companions), or at rest, posing in front of mirrors and lounging against doors as they smoke cigarettes, breaking down hierarchies between the artist and the model. Whether confronting viewers with a direct gaze or seemingly unaware of their presence, Brice's women stand as empowered figures driven by their own desires, rather than those of the spectator.
South-African-born, London-based artist Lisa Brice challenges traditional representations of women in Western art history through her figurative painting practice. The female nude, depicted in Brice's signature cobalt blue, is reclaimed from a male gaze that seeks to disempower women as passive objects of desire. In individual and group portraits, set in studios and bars, women are liberated from the roles of model and muse. They are shown interchangeably brandishing paint brushes, as they capture their own likenesses (and that of their companions), or at rest, posing in front of mirrors and lounging against doors as they smoke cigarettes, breaking down hierarchies between the artist and the model. Whether confronting viewers with a direct gaze or seemingly unaware of their presence, Brice's women stand as empowered figures driven by their own desires, rather than those of the spectator.
The characters and settings that appear in Brice's paintings are composites built from diverse images collected from magazines, the internet, personal photographs and, above all, art history. 'All painting is a lineage - it's all a conversation with what's come before,' she says. Elements of well-known paintings by European male artists, including Degas, Manet, Picasso and Vallotton, are echoed and reimagined in her interior scenes. Yet, crucially, she does not solely respond to the male giants of Western art history, but recovers an under-acknowledged lineage of work by female painters. The American Abstract Expressionist Helen Frankenthaler is shown pouring puddles of cobalt blue paint onto a canvas, images of Dutch painter Charley Toorop and Yayoi Kusama are fused in an act of self-portraiture, while Gertrude Stein (as painted by Picasso in 1905-6) is placed next to Vallotton's seated figure from The White and the Black (1913), establishing intergenerational dialogues between female cultural figures. Early years working as a printmaking assistant for South-African-based artist Sue Williamson instilled Brice's interest in repetition and her characters, including a hissing black cat taken from Manet's Olympia (1863), recur across her body of work as she builds, in her own words, 'a small army of feminine figures'.
Squeezed straight from the tube, the striking cobalt blue that dominates Brice's palette has accrued meaning through its application within her practice. Initially employed in an attempt to capture the blue light of a neon sign and the atmospheric hue of twilight, it has become a reference to the Trinidadian 'blue devil', evidencing the close ties she maintains with the island following a residency at CCA7 in Port of Spain in the late 1990s. The 'blue devil' is a Carnival character evoked by masqueraders who cover their bodies in (usually blue) paint or tinted mud. The former is traditionally made from Reckitt's Blue powder - a substance historically used across the British Empire for bluing whites that was repurposed for skin bleaching. For Brice, the cultural practice and its integration into her own work is a means of 'obscuring naturalistic skin tones and interrupting an easy or preconditioned reading of the subject along ethnic lines.'
Brice studied at Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town and settled in London following a residency at Gasworks in 1998. She has spent extended periods working in Trinidad where she participated in a workshop in Grande Riviere in 1999 and a residency in Port of Spain in 2000 with fellow artists Chris Ofili, Peter Doig and Emheyo Bahabba (Embah). In 2020, she presented a major solo exhibition, Smoke and Mirrors, at KM21, The Hague, which was followed by her inclusion in the lauded group exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2021. She has presented further solo exhibitions at UK museums and public institutions including the Charleston Trust, Lewes (2021) and Tate Britain, London (2018).
Brice's work has also been featured in important group exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2022); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2022); Camden Art Centre, London (2016); and South African National Gallery, Cape Town (2016). Her paintings are found in major public collections including Tate, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; Johannesburg Art Gallery; South African National Gallery, Cape Town; and X Museum, Beijing. Brice’s work was included in Between the Islands at Tate Britain, London, in 2021–22, and is currently on view in Capturing The Moment at Tate Modern, London until 28 January 2024.
Artworks
Museum Exhibitions
