Lisa Brice

Lisa Brice was born in 1968 in Cape Town, South Africa. She studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, earning a BA in Fine Arts in 1990, and worked as a printmaking assistant to the South African artist Sue Williamson from 1988 to 1991. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1993. In 1998 she took up a residency at Gasworks Gallery and settled in London. A 1999 workshop and a 2000 residency in Trinidad, alongside artists including Chris Ofili, Peter Doig, and Emheyo Bahabba (Embah), drew her into an extended engagement with the Caribbean that continues to inform her work; she has since described herself as living and working between London and Trinidad.

Brice's paintings, often worked in ultramarine, cobalt blue, and vermilion, take the female nude of Western painting as their subject and turn its terms around, giving her figures agency, interiority, and a returned gaze rather than the passivity of the tradition they quote. The approach won early institutional support in South Africa and London through the 2000s and 2010s, and by 2018 it had carried her to a solo exhibition, Art Now: Lisa Brice, at Tate Britain.

Brice's critical reception has tracked her institutional rise. Tate's 2018 Art Now exhibition and her inclusion in the Hayward Gallery's 2021 survey Mixing It Up: Painting Today positioned her among the leading figurative painters addressing the history of the nude. Tate Britain's own framing of her practice, that she recasts female subjects with a sense of self-possession inside a longstanding art-historical tradition, has been echoed by galleries and curators writing about her work, including in connection with her appearance in Tate Modern's Capturing the Moment through January 2024. The critical throughline is consistent: Brice is read less as a painter of the female body than as a painter correcting how that body has historically been painted.

Brice's auction market has moved sharply in the last few years. Her current record is After Embah (2018), which sold for GBP 5,410,000 (about USD 6.9 million) at Sotheby's London on 4 March 2025, more than doubling her previous high of about USD 3.17 million for No Bare Back, after Embah (2017), set at Sotheby's New York on 18 November 2021. Both records involve reworkings of the same source composition tied to her time in Trinidad with the artist Embah, underscoring how concentrated her price history still is around a small number of major canvases.

Brice's market has grown quickly, but its history is still thin, anchored by a small number of major-canvas sales rather than a long run of comparable transactions, so a single result, such as the March 2025 sale of After Embah, can move the picture of her market considerably. There is no published catalogue raisonne, which places extra weight on provenance and on verification through her representing galleries. Her museum footprint, including Tate, the Hammer Museum, SFMOMA, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, is a stronger and steadier signal of long-term standing than any single auction result.