Lisa Brice LIVES and WORKS Lisa Brice LIVES and WORKS

Lisa Brice LIVES and WORKS

2023年10月16日—2024年1月10日
Paris Marais

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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

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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.

Brice echoes and reimagines art historical figures and scenes while reclaiming them from a male gaze that effectively disempowers women...
Brice echoes and reimagines art historical figures and scenes while reclaiming them from a male gaze that effectively disempowers women as passive objects of desire and refracting them through ideas of self-representation and empowerment. The woman on the far left in this work paints her own anatomy in a subversion of Gustave Courbet’s L’origine du monde (1866; Musée d'Orsay, Paris), which depicts a nude female model’s lower half. By painting herself, the woman in Brice’s work is liberated from the restrictive role of model to become the author of her own likeness.
 
Gustave Courbet
L'Origine du monde1866
Oil on canvas
46.3 x 55.4 cm
© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
Brice grapples not only with the questions of gender but also of race generated by the paintings she references. In...
Brice grapples not only with the questions of gender but also of race generated by the paintings she references. In...
Brice grapples not only with the questions of gender but also of race generated by the paintings she references. In one of the works on view, she returns to Félix Vallotton’s charged The White and the Black (La Blanche et la Noire, 1913; Kunstmuseum Bern), itself made in response to Édouard Manet’s controversial Olympia (1863; Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
 
Lisa Brice
Untitled (after Vallotton), 2023
Pigment and oil on canvas
2 panels, each : 200 x 95.2 cm (78.74 x 37.48 in)
 
Félix Vallotton
The White and the Black (La Blanche et la Noire), 1913
Oil on canvas
114 × 147 cm (56.69 x 57.87 in)
Kunstmuseum Bern. Hahnloser/Jaeggli Foundation, Villa Flora, Winterthur 
© Hahnloser/Jaeggli Stiftung. Photography: Reto Pedrini, Zürich
In this mirror image, Brice makes reference to Manet's The Cats’ Rendezvous (1868; Art Institute Chicago): a reference she included...
In this mirror image, Brice makes reference to Manet's The Cats’ Rendezvous (1868; Art Institute Chicago): a reference she included...

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' Rendezvous1868
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) –...

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.

Édouard Manet
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)
Oil on canvas
The Courtauld, London. Samuel Courtauld Trust © The Courtauld
Brice breaks down the divide between the roles of artist and muse to invest her subjects with a decisive force...

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 Brice
Untitled (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...

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.

Lisa Brice
Untitled, 2023
Pigment and gouache on canvas
200 x 92 cm (78.74 x 36.22 in)

 

Depicted holding paint brushes or palettes, or reflected back in canvases or mirrors, Brice’s figures suggest a subtle yet powerful...

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 Brice
Untitled, 2023
Oil on tracing paper
41.9 x 29.6 cm (16.5 x 11.65 in)
The bar is a recurring setting in Brice’s work. This space, which was typically male-dominated in fin-de-siècle Paris, is transformed by Brice into a safe haven for women. The palette of this work, as well as its composition – split horizontally by the line of the bar – and the prominence of the wine glass, recall Picasso’s Pierreuses au bar (1902; Hiroshima Museum of Art). In Brice’s bars, always devoid of the expected male presence, women sit at ease, smoking and drinking freely.
The blue drawings are a way for Brice to process source images into her own hand and visual language. This practice of drawing enables her to identify figures and poses that may become part of larger compositions: an audition of sorts. These preparatory drawings have evolved into works in their own right, and are often exhibited together, placed in conversation with one another.
Lisa Brice Untitled, 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

The hint of pink of some of Brice’s subjects’ buttocks, meanwhile, references the complexion of the model in Laura Knight’s...
The hint of pink of some of Brice’s subjects’ buttocks, meanwhile, references the complexion of the model in Laura Knight’s...
The hint of pink of some of Brice’s subjects’ buttocks, meanwhile, references the complexion of the model in Laura Knight’s boundary-breaking Laura Knight with model, Ella Louise Naper ('Self Portrait') (1913; National Portrait Gallery, London). Dashes of pink appear on the models’ buttocks, rendering their nude form softer and humanising the depiction of the female body.
 
Lisa Brice
Untitled, 2022
Oil on tracing paper
210 x 101.6 cm (82.68 x 40 in)
 
 
Laura Knight (1877—1970)
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
Pulling her subjects out of history and bringing them together, in LIVES and WORKS, Brice sets up an intergenerational conversation: ‘rescu[ing] previously isolated figures of women from the confines of a renowned painting and giv[ing] them a new existence, among a fresh grouping of other women – a liberation of sorts’, as Brice said in a 2021 interview with Tate curator Aïcha Mehrez. In studios or bars, emerging defiantly from wisps of cigarette smoke and low lighting, whether confronting viewers with a direct stare or seemingly unaware of their presence, the artist’s subjects stand as empowered figures driven by their own desires, rather than those of the spectator. Brice is once again, as Yasmijn Jarram, curator of Brice’s 2020–21 exhibition at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, wrote, not ‘serving the viewer’s gaze, but rather directing it.’
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