Lisa Brice Paints a Fiery Female Vengeance

As you first step into Sadie Coles HQ’s new Savile Row space, the paintings in Lisa Brice’s ‘Keep Your Powder Dry’ make a subdued first impression. On the ground floor of the townhouse, the works are mostly modest in scale and dominated by rusty hues rather than the South African artist’s characteristic electric blues. On closer inspection, however, these paintings pack a hefty punch. Across multiple galleries and floors, tough yet sensual women group together while spiky-haired cats weave around their legs. The paintings’ dirty, metallic reds evoke the taste of blood, while the subjects’ feline eyes narrow towards us, seemingly ready to attack. The human scale of some works places us in direct confrontation with these women, as if surrounded by them and drawn into their smoke-filled arena.

Throughout the show, Brice wrestles with the historically soft, meek and objectified presentation of women in painting and their sometimes-fraught position within the contemporary sociopolitical landscape. Her response is a fiery vision of female might and vengeance. The poses in the works are inspired, in part, by Honor Blackman’s Book of Self Defence (1965), whose images feature the actress, legendary Bond girl and judo practitioner, beating men to a pulp. Brice has also drawn inspiration from more conventional art-historical works, including Artemisia Gentileschi’s ferocious Judith Slaying Holofernes (c.1612–14), created in the aftermath of her rape and the subsequent trial.

In one pigment-on-linen work shaped like a folding screen (all works Untitled, 2025), a series of women in sporting attire shadow-box and pose before mirrors, with a steamy boxing ring in the background. The smell of cigarette smoke in this timeless theatre is almost palpable, and I can’t help but think of the vicious chorus of female inmates in Chicago’s ‘Cell Block Tango’ (1975). In another work, Brice places the viewer and her subjects in the more sociable, yet equally confronting, space of the bar. Her figures are reflected in the shiny countertop, their mirror images as clear as their spectral physical forms, as they blend into the darkness behind them. A series of glass bottles and a corkscrew scattered about the bar suggest weapons that could be employed at any moment.

In a smaller, crimson-stained painting, a shadowy cat laps at a puddle of inky liquid. Perhaps it’s milk, or maybe it has spilled from someone’s flesh. Heavily defined brush marks track in straight lines horizontally and vertically across several paintings, creating grid-like spaces that contain the hazier action. Double images – whether in the form of reflective puddles, shiny bar tops or literal mirrors – proliferate throughout, creating the unsettling feeling that we are being watched from every angle. Brice’s figures remain alert and locked in at all times. The recurrence of grouped subjects in her works highlights the power these women find in multitudes, inspired in part by Francisco Goya’s Atropos, or The Fates (1819–23), a painting forged from darkness, its eerie Fates acting in concert as they levitate above the earth. Brice’s figures similarly take on a supernatural strength, evoking a fierce liberation akin to witchery.

Like many of Brice’s paintings, these works are simultaneously intensely physical and ghostly. Her figures contain multitudes: slinky but brutal, beguiling and terrifying. This duality is captured in a cat that hisses behind the crossed ankles of a mirror-wielding figure. Its fluffy, arched back and bared fangs teeter between captivating and petrifying. To protect themselves, many women who have experienced trauma feel compelled to moderate how they act in the world, avoiding that which might invite further pain. Brice offers a cathartic fantasy. She allows her women to be everything, meeting violence not with recoil but with untamed, hot aggression.

Lisa Brice’s ‘Keep Your Powder Dry’ is at Sadie Coles Savile Row, London, until 20 December



^{Main image: Lisa Brice, Untitled (detail), 2025, pigment and natural water-soluble binders on linen, 5 panels; each panel: 186 × 61 cm. Courtesy © the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London; photograph: Katie Morrison}