Lisa Brice

South-African-born, London-based artist Lisa Brice challenges traditional representations of women in Western art history through her figurative painting practice. Echoing compositions of modernist stalwarts including Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso, Brice subverts her predecessors by imbuing her women figures with a historically uncommon sense of agency and self-possession. In individual and group portraits set in studios and bars, women are liberated from the roles of model and muse. Many of the artist’s works feature figures in doorways—indeed, it is the liminality of these threshold spaces where Brice examines the dichotomies of interior/exterior, public/private, and artist/model. Brice’s use of vermillion and cobalt across her oeuvre also functions to obscure the bodies she depicts, further discouraging an easily digestible consumption of the female form. Brice's women stand as empowered figures driven by their own desires, rather than those of the spectator.

The artist has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including an exhibition of new work at Charleston in East Sussex (UK) in 2021; Lisa Brice: Smoke and Mirrors at KM21, The Hague (NL) in 2020, with an accompanying catalogue; an eponymous exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (UK) in 2019; and Art Now: Lisa Brice at Tate Britain, London (UK) in 2018.