"I am drawn to the ambiguity that people and places can hold. Sometimes the compositions of my paintings feel like cinematic outtakes: the moments between directed actions, when the figures are ‘on their own time,’ self-involved, performing only for themselves or one another."
—Lisa BriceLisa Brice’s Untitled xliii, (Well Worn 8), 2015 presents a woman looking an being looked at. Exhibiting a regard for art historic reference while experimenting with traditions of portraiture, the present work sees Brice examine the implications of autobiographic observation. The mirror features prominently in Brice’s Well Worn series, and through this device, Brice entangles her viewers in the act of watching and being watched.Untitled xliii, (Well Worn 8) disorients the gaze by employing a mirror as the central compositional element, and the minimally rendered figure is further abstracted by imposed vertical stripes. Brice convolutes the act of looking through this near-illusionistic obstacle to seeing, though viewing from over the shoulder of Brice’s figure, the act of seeing is paradoxically doubled. Mirroring is a recurrent device within Brice’s practice, here resulting in the woman looking at herself within the confines of a private space, only to be disturbed by the viewer watching her through window blinds, which are alluded to by the stripes of the fabric. Viewers are thus made complicit in this scene, peering into an intimate moment in an almost voyeuristic experience. The subject, however, has also become an active viewer, depicted as an agent of looking rather than a passive subject being looked at.
"Sometimes the simple act of repainting an image of a woman previously painted by a man – re-authoring the work as by a woman – can be a potent shift in itself."
—Lisa Brice
Edgar Degas, Repasseuses (Laundresses), 1884-86, Musee d’Orsay, Paris. Image: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY In a style unmistakably unique to Brice, Untitled xliii, (Well Worn 8) also responds to representations of women in art history. By depicting women in everyday moments, as familiarly done by the likes of Degas and Manet, Brice nods to traditions of the genre but also upends them. The present work challenges traditional representations of women in intimate, domestic spaces while nodding to the multiplicity and pervasive self-scrutiny of the digital era. The fabric’s stripes can alternatively be interpreted as an allusion to digital printing process and reproduction, speaking to anonymity that comes with the volume of images posted to social media. Though surveying herself in the mirror while posing boldly, the figure remains mysterious, anonymous, and detached in Brice’s treatment.
Provenance
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2017Exhibited
Johannesburg, Goodman Gallery, Lisa Brice, April 16–May 14, 2015
318
Untitled xliii, (Well Worn 8)
signed and dated "Lisa Brice 2015" on the overlap
ink on printed cotton
49 3/4 x 37 3/4 in. (126.4 x 95.9 cm)
Executed in 2015.
Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000
Sold for $138,600
Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Day Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com
20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session
New York Auction 16 November 2022
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