In her latest body of work, Lisa Brice continues to challenge traditional representations of women in art history. Inheriting from and renewing the genre of the nude as painted by male artists, she transposes familiar scenes in an act of re-authorship that proposes an alternative to the power dynamics inherent in such images.
Watch writer Jennifer Higgie discuss the exhibition
The characters and settings that appear in Brice's paintings are built from diverse images collected from personal photographs, various media and, above all, art history, which provides a rich seam of inspiration for the artist. ‘All painting is a lineage – it's all a conversation with what has come before,’ she says. Drawing specifically on paintings made in Paris from the mid to late 19th to early 20th centuries, in the works on view, Brice is responding to the work of painters historically active in the French capital.
Untitled (after Vallotton), 2023
Pigment and oil on canvas
2 panels, each : 200 x 95.2 cm (78.74 x 37.48 in)
The White and the Black (La Blanche et la Noire), 1913
Oil on canvas
114 × 147 cm (56.69 x 57.87 in)
In this mirror image, Brice makes reference to Manet's The Cats’ Rendezvous (1868; Art Institute Chicago): a reference she included as a nod to the symbolic cat Manet also painted in his Olympia, after which Felix Vallotton's painting was made.
Lisa Brice
Untitled (after Vallotton), 2023
Pigment and gouache on canvas
200 x 83 cm (78.74 x 32.68 in)
Édouard Manet
The Cats' Rendezvous, 1868
Lithograph in black on ivory wove paper, laid down on ivory cloth
43.9 × 33.4 cm (17 5/16 × 13 3/16 in)
In this painting, Brice reappropriates the scene of Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882; The Courtauld, London) – a longstanding source of inspiration to the artist. The work also holds references to Brice’s previous work. The bottles of champagne in Manet’s composition are replaced here by rum and Stag beer, in a nod to the Trinidadian context familiar from her After Embah bar scenes from 2017. The country has provided a rich seam of inspiration to Brice since her residency in Port of Spain in 2000, and, as such, she revisits Manet’s barmaid with a central figure based on a pose by the Trinidadian rapper Nicki Minaj.
Brice breaks down the divide between the roles of artist and muse to invest her subjects with a decisive force in their own depiction. She ‘gives them back their agency and creativity’, as curator Laura Smith has written: ‘they look purposefully at their own reflections in order to paint themselves, armed with [...] cigarettes and brushes.’
Lisa BriceUntitled (after Courbet), 2023
Pigment and oil on linen
75 x 112 cm (29.53 x 44.09 in)
The title of the exhibition, LIVES and WORKS, is a play on words. Both interchangeable as verb and noun, the two terms recall the opening words of an artist’s biography while simultaneously signifying the duality of the existence of the female artists/models, such as Suzanne Valadon, whose essence underpins the works on view.
Depicted holding paint brushes or palettes, or reflected back in canvases or mirrors, Brice’s figures suggest a subtle yet powerful shift from subjecthood to authorship.
Lisa BriceUntitled, 2023
Oil on tracing paper
41.9 x 29.6 cm (16.5 x 11.65 in)
Lisa Brice
Untitled, 2023
Oil on tracing paper
41.9 x 29.6 cm (16.5 x 11.65 in)
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. — Lisa Brice
Untitled, 2022
Oil on tracing paper
210 x 101.6 cm (82.68 x 40 in)
Laura Knight with model, Ella Louise Naper ('Self Portrait'), 1913
Oil on canvas
152.4 x 127.6 cm (60 x 50.23 in)
The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2021. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images
