Notes

Lisa Brice studied painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, although after graduating she focused on wall artworks, installations and sculptural pieces combining steel with found objects and domestic materials. Brice returned to painting in the early 2000s and presented her first solo exhibition of paintings in South Africa in 2005. “Uncertainty is central to painting, and its strength, and that’s very much what attracted me back to the medium,” Brice, who lives between London and Trinidad, said in 2010.¹ This work was first shown in 2007 on an exhibition thematically occupied with coming of age and adolescent sexuality. Many of the exhibition’s works were based on photographs of contemporary teenagers at school dances and parties, although this particular work refers to an oil painting by Norwegian symbolist Edvard Munch, The Kiss (1897). Munch was for a number of years preoccupied with the motif of a couple kissing and produced many studies towards The Kiss. Similarly, Brice painted a number of different versions of a couple kissing – this was her first.

1. Godfried Donkor, ‘Embracing Uncertainty:  Interview with Lisa Brice’, Art South Africa, volume 9.1, Spring 2010, page 57.

Exhibited

Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Base One Two Three, 2007.