John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ is the unofficial poster girl of Tate Britain. Most recently her soggy image was slapped on the cover of the book of Tate ‘highlights’ overflowing on the gift shop stands. Lisa Brice, a South African-born artist now living in London, was commissioned to paint a response to the famous pre-Raph portrait as part of her ‘Art Now’ exhibition.
As you’d expect from a painter best known for turning the male-dominated traditions of art history inside out, Brice’s ‘After Ophelia’ drags the pale near-corpse out of the water and resuscitates her as a blue-bodied nude goddess smoking a fag.
Brice’s other remix of the art canon for the exhibition – a take on William Rothenstein’s ‘Parting at Morning’ – is a less dramatic departure from its inspiration, but the cigarette and the DGAF attitude recur, as they do again and again in both the large- and small-scale paintings on display here.
The other common threads are Brice’s trademark use of blue, used to disguise and distort identity and ethnicity, plus an arched-back skinny cat that stalks through the painted rooms. In ‘After Ophelia’ it’s dragged in a dead rat.
But it’s the attitude that really matters. Brice’s women don’t so much return the male gaze as ignore it altogether. Self-possessed, sexual and surrounded by other women, there’s a lot to be said about how they differ from most other images of women filling the Tate’s collection.
But perhaps the most radical thing of all is how Brice paints women doing… not a lot. They’re neither plucking or stitching away, a la Vermeer, nor lying there waiting to be stared at, as Ingres would have it. Most often they’re just hanging out with the girls, having a beer.