Lisa Brice

Lisa Brice (b. 1968) is a painter whose influential body of work contests the misogynistic nature of figuration across the history of Western art. Echoing compositions of modernist stalwarts including Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso, Brice subverts her predecessors by imbuing her women figures an historically uncommon sense of agency and self-possession. 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.

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.

Brice is currently included in Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now at Tate Britain, London (UK) through April. Recent group exhibitions include Mixing It Up: Painting Today at Hayward Gallery, London (UK) in 2021; A Collection of Wakefield at the Hepworth Wakefield (UK) in 2020; Monster/Beauty: An Exploration of the Female/Femme Gaze at Lychee One, London (UK) in 2020; and Artists I Steal From, curated by Alvaro Barrington and Julia Peyton-Jones, at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London (UK) in 2019.

The artist’s work is included in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (CA); the Johannesburg Art Gallery (SA); the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; the Tate Britain, London (UK); and the X Museum, Beijing (CN), among many others.