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?