During the course of her career spent living between London and Trinidad, Lisa Brice has continually tackled the subject of the female nude, challenging the misogynistic representation of historical portraiture to lend her protagonists power and self-possession. Increasingly cementing her status as one of the foremost artists working today, Lisa Brice has accumulated solo representations at Tate Britain, London, on the occasion of the Art Now series, and at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, in the past two years. In late 2020, she will again be the subject of a major institutional exhibition at GEM, in The Netherlands.
The present work, Untitled, 2019, emerges from a collection of new works produced in conjunction with her highly acclaimed solo exhibition at Stephen Friedman, London, in 2019. Drenched in vermillion or deep cobalt blues, and exploring the enigmatic nature of female silhouettes, these recent works hover between figuration and abstraction, delving almost as much into the potentialities of colour as they do into the subject of portraiture. At the centre of the present composition, an anonymous woman leans against a desk-like structure, looking over her shoulder towards the ground. Oriented in the viewer’s field of vision, her face is at once accessible and not, her traits only partly visible as her eyes elude the viewer’s gaze. Rich with introspective tonalities, Untitled suggests a state of rêverie, plunging its protagonist into a realm that is out of reach — a universe that seems to exist only for her.