BOOK: Lisa Brice-Lives and Works Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

The book “Lives and Works” presents the lates body of work by Lisa Brice, who 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. 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. Squeezed straight from the tube, the striking cobalt blue that dominates Brice’s palette has accrued meaning through its application within her practice. Initially employed in an attempt to capture the blue light of a neon sign and the atmospheric hue of twilight, it has become a reference to the Trinidadian ‘blue devil’, evidencing the close ties she maintains with the island following a residency at CCA7 in Port of Spain in the late 1990s. The ‘blue devil’ is a Carnival character evoked by masqueraders who cover their bodies in (usually blue) paint or tinted mud. The former is traditionally made from Reckitt’s Blue powder – a substance historically used across the British Empire for bluing whites that was repurposed for skin bleaching.-Efi Michalarou