Overview
Lisa Brice’s work interrogates the male gaze by challenging and reinterpreting traditional depictions of the female nude from the perspective of a female artist.
Lisa Brice’s work interrogates the male gaze by challenging and reinterpreting traditional depictions of the female nude from the perspective of a female artist.
Lisa Brice was born in 1968 in Cape Town, South Africa. She now lives and works between London, England and Trinidad.
Brice contests the misogynistic nature of historical figuration typically painted by white men for white men and takes ownership over how women are portrayed. Working within the parameters of art history, she echoes iconic compositions by artists such as Degas, Manet and Picasso, but instead lends her muses agency and self-possession. Her interiors draw on the artist’s personal experience from living and working between South Africa, London and Trinidad over the past 20 years.
Repudiating the gaze of the viewer, formal devices such as mirrors, smoke and metal grilles veil her subjects. Examining notions of liminality, Brice's paintings often play with the dimensions and format of doorways and emphasise the immediacy of our encounter with her muses as we address them face-to-face. The artist is interested in such threshold spaces where transitional states of being come into play; interior and exterior, public and private, artist and model. Her use of vermillion and cobalt blue in many of the works obscures the naturalistic skin tones of the body to further discourage an easy ‘read' of the female form.
In 2018, Brice had a solo exhibition at Tate Britain, London as part of their Art Now series. A major institutional exhibition by the artist opened at KM21, The Hague in November 2020 featuring new paintings and works on paper.
