LISA BRICE

Known for her depictions of feminine actors in interior spaces and working environments, Brice reflects on the erosion of safety in the current socio-political climate. She gives her protagonists codes of collective assertiveness, an emboldened and defensive response, willing the triumph of the underdog. The characters here are powerful, proactive, effective: they are David not Goliath, Judith not Holofernes. Drawing on images of violence in art history from the likes of Gentileschi, Caravaggio, Manet and Magritte, Brice was similarly inspired by Honor Blackman’s 1965 Book of Self Defence which is illustrated by images showing various men being beaten black-and-blue by the judogi clad siren.

Brice conflates the often-intimate observation of passive groups of women in late 19th and early 20th CenturyFrench painting into a brooding solidarity of resistance. In the group of paintings which picture figures on the horizon of a bar, the protagonists are ready for action, their makeshift weapons near to hand, their victims engaged. These combative bodies appear again as the audience in a smokily-lit fight club that is the subject of another painting. In this ambitious composition, the ring is framed by a parade of athletic combatants who turn the tables on our viewpoint by posing with mirrors in preparation to enter the fray.

In a further development, the palette across all three parts of the exhibition is reduced into firmly sobering tones of black, red, brown and grey in a departure from the vibrancy of earlier works. The grisaille painting of PieterBruegel the Elder, Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery in the Courtauld Collection and Francisco de Goya’s Black Paintings, particularly Atropos (the Fates) are treasured references. The subtle rebellion of the subjects in this exhibition, their strength in numbers against repression or bullying, asks us to imagine the potential of collective action.