Lisa Brice
Shown in various states of undress, the figures in Brice’s Untitled (Blue) appear insensible to the viewer, existing in a quiet interior thick with intrigue and cigarette smoke. Save the cat, the painting’s five protagonists are all women, and almost all are smoking (this being a pastime, assumedly, of the self-possessed). Some are borrowed from art history – the seated figure in the foreground taken from Félix Vallotton’s The White and the Black (1913) – while others are gleaned from the artist’s own photographs or from images found in magazines. The women regard one another in silence. The cat regards the viewer. On Brice’s canvas, women who once played the part of muse or allegory now appear as actors waiting in the wings – unwatched, a little bored, resolutely themselves.
b.1968, Cape Town
Returning to the women of art history, Lisa Brice’s paintings and works on paper are studies in selfhood. The conceptual gesture is simple: women drawn by woman. "The simple act of repainting an image of a woman previously painted by a man – re-authoring the work as by a woman," the artist suggests, "is a potent shift in itself." The figures she paints are more often monochromatic, reduced from fleshy tones to a single shade of cobalt blue. With her brush, Brice returns to these women an interior life, a subjectivity beyond their previous lives as objects of desire. If a nude, she asks, is a woman painted by men for men, what can she become when the male gaze is absent?