Lisa Brice

Home, that sweet centre of our lives, is not the calm refuge of our deepest longings in the art of Lisa Brice. It is under attack from every quarter, threatened from without by social instability and a rising crime rate, and sabotaged from within by the social conditioning that leads men and women to treat each other as stereotypes.

Hard-hitting, graphic and meticulously constructed, Brice's work takes no prisoners. One either accepts or rejects the terms that are laid down. There are no half-measures, no equivocations. The content is amazingly clear, the usage of materials incisive.
For Brice, her work is a way of processing difficult experiences. `The first drawings I'll make will be very subjective, painterly. And then as I deal with the episode through the painting, it will go further away, and the work will become more objective.'

On a trip to Thailand, Brice found herself in a bar in which every other female was a barely clad prostitute, most of them still in their early teens. Brice was shocked by the exploitative situation: many of the young girls had been swopped by their parents for items like TV sets. Bar signs read `Girls fucky fucky' and `Pussy pulls razor blades'. `Women were being reduced to freaks to entertain the constant flow of foreigners on sex package tours,' says Brice.

Gender issues and the dehumanising of women were to become a main theme for Brice. The crude, tacky imagery and flashing lights of Thai bar signs resurfaced in her `Sex Show Works' of 1991, held in the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town.
The sheer verve of these works caught the eye of German gallerists Frank and Ellen Haenel, who bought everything and gave Lisa Brice her first one-person show at their Frankfurt gallery in 1993.
At that show, viewers found themselves confronted by the Sex Kittens, nine of them, lined up on the walls and crawling forwards. A sardonic play between form and content pulled no punches: the come-on seductiveness of the pose was completely contradicted by the messages given off by a reading of the surface imagery. Since then, Brice has won a strong following in Germany and shows regularly at art fairs and galleries from Basle to Frankfurt, extending this in the last year to include London, Lisbon and Santiago.

Recent work reflected a return to an early theme: domestic security. In 1990 Brice returned home one night to find a scene of blood-smeared walls and horror. Her housemate had been stabbed 14 times by an intruder and was near death. He miraculously recovered, but the house, had to be scrubbed and repainted, and the smell of the clean, freshly painted walls seemed merely to reinforce the memory of what lay beneath.

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Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal in Art in South Africa - the future present

Home, that sweet centre of our lives, is not the calm refuge of our deepest longings in the art of Lisa Brice. It is under attack from every quarter, threatened from without by social instability and a rising crime rate, and sabotaged from within by the social conditioning that leads men and women to treat each other as stereotypes.
Hard-hitting, graphic and meticulously constructed, Brice's work takes no prisoners. One either accepts or rejects the terms that are laid down. There are no half-measures, no equivocations. The content is amazingly clear, the usage of materials incisive. For Brice, her work is a way of processing difficult experiences. `The first drawings I'll make will be very subjective, painterly. And then as I deal with the episode through the painting, it will go further away, and the work will become more objective.' On a trip to Thailand, Brice found herself in a bar in which every other female was a barely clad prostitute, most of them still in their early teens. Brice was shocked by the exploitative situation: many of the young girls had been swopped by their parents for items like TV sets. Bar signs read `Girls fucky fucky' and `Pussy pulls razor blades'. `Women were being reduced to freaks to entertain the constant flow of foreigners on sex package tours,' says Brice. Gender issues and the dehumanising of women were to become a main theme for Brice. The crude, tacky imagery and flashing lights of Thai bar signs resurfaced in her `Sex Show Works' of 1991, held in the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town.		The sheer verve of these works caught the eye of German gallerists Frank and Ellen Haenel, who bought everything and gave Lisa Brice her first one-person show at their Frankfurt gallery in 1993. At that show, viewers found themselves confronted by the Sex Kittens, nine of them, lined up on the walls and crawling forwards. A sardonic play between form and content pulled no punches: the come-on seductiveness of the pose was completely contradicted by the messages given off by a reading of the surface imagery. Since then, Brice has won a strong following in Germany and shows regularly at art fairs and galleries from Basle to Frankfurt, extending this in the last year to include London, Lisbon and Santiago. Recent work reflected a return to an early theme: domestic security. In 1990 Brice returned home one night to find a scene of blood-smeared walls and horror. Her housemate had been stabbed 14 times by an intruder and was near death. He miraculously recovered, but the house, had to be scrubbed and repainted, and the smell of the clean, freshly painted walls seemed merely to reinforce the memory of what lay beneath. More...

Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal in Art in South Africa - the future present