ARTIST LISA BRICE
The Blue That Looks Back
Lisa Brice repaints the female nude in her own cobalt light, from Trinidad's Carnival to her Tate Britain debut.
Absolutely obsessed, lately, with the cobalt blue paintings of Lisa Brice. She is a South African-born, London-based painter who has spent long stretches of time living and working in Trinidad, and that second home shows up everywhere in the work, not as backdrop but as pigment.
Brice paints women in down-time: smoking, dressing, watching the room, caught in the middle of some private ritual that has nothing to do with being looked at. That's the quiet reversal at the center of her practice. The female nude has a long, heavily male-authored history in painting, and Brice's women don't sit inside that history so much as take it back. They pose on their own terms, for their own pleasure, and the effect is that the viewer starts to feel less like a welcomed guest and more like an intruder who has walked in on something.
Her figures often echo poses from Degas, Manet, Vallotton and Picasso, artists whose names are shorthand for exactly the tradition she's answering back to. Several works respond directly to pieces in Tate's own collection, including a version of John Everett Millais's Ophelia that Brice brings back from the water, cigarette in hand, very much alive.
A blue with a history
The specific blue is not incidental. Brice has said it started as an attempt to capture two kinds of light: the artificial glow of a neon sign, and the soft, fading color of dusk. Over time the same blue picked up a second, heavier meaning, tied to Trinidad's Carnival tradition of the "blue devil", masqueraders who coat their skin in cobalt paint or tinted mud and become, for a day, someone else entirely.
That paint has its own uncomfortable backstory. The pigment traditionally used is a form of Reckitt's Blue, a laundry whitener once shipped across the British Empire to brighten linens, and also repurposed, darkly, as a skin-lightening agent. Brice's use of that same cobalt does something closer to the opposite: it flattens and obscures skin tone rather than reading it, so a figure resists being sorted along ethnic lines at a glance. The color becomes a way of withholding one kind of information so another kind, agency, gesture, mood, can come forward instead.
A small army of women
Brice began this body of work in 2014, and the scale of it was almost obsessive from the start.
"I painted a group of 60 continuously day and night for a month."Lisa Brice
They grew, in her words, into a small army of feminine figures. Recurring props move through the paintings and drawings like a private vocabulary: cigarettes, paintbrushes, mirrors, easels. Some of her women are shown mid-pose as models; others are shown painting, which quietly rewrites who gets to be the author of the image and who has historically only been its subject. Some meet the viewer's eye directly. Others don't seem to register that anyone is watching at all, which somehow makes the confrontation sharper, not softer.
Brice studied painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town before settling in London, and her ties to Trinidad go back to a workshop there in the late 1990s, followed by a residency the year after. Art Now: Lisa Brice opened at Tate Britain in April 2018 and ran through that August, her first showing at the museum and a strong signal of a painter whose reputation had, until then, been quietly building outside the mainstream art press.
For more: a good overview of the Tate show is up at Creative Boom, and Filthy Dreams has a genuinely great deep dive on her work if you want to go further. Brice is represented by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, and you can read more about the Tate exhibition at tate.org.uk.
Leila Antakly is an independent cultural interviewer, editor, and founder of Antakly Projects, the platform she launched in New York in 2003 as Ninu Nina. For more than two decades, she has interviewed artists, musicians, photographers, designers, and creative thinkers across art, music, fashion, photography, film, and contemporary culture.
Her interviews are driven by curiosity, research, and direct conversation rather than celebrity, trend, or algorithm. Antakly looks for the people, ideas, and creative practices shaping culture, with particular attention to artists who deserve a deeper conversation beyond the usual press cycle.
