REVIEW: Lisa Brice ‘Keep Your Powder Dry’ at Sadie Coles HQ
Text by Tanya Mascarenhas
Installation view, Lisa Brice, Keep Your Powder Dry, Sadie Coles HQ, Savile Row, 15 October - 20 December 2025: © Lisa Brice. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Katie Morrison
Scenes of smoke, mirrors and bars - whether the ropes of a boxing ring or dim lacquered counters where sultry concoctions are poured - all combined with fleeting images of nude women intertwined with feline forms. Lisa Brice’s exhibition Keep Your Powder Dry at Sadie Coles’ new Savile Row space brings together a selection of works that capture the empowered female form. In a departure from the striking cobalt blue paintings that emerged from the artist’s time spent in Trinidad, Brice’s new colour palette consists of subtle washes of black, red, brown and grey. Although more muted in colour, the works in Keep Your Powder Dry are no less impactful, asserting an all-encompassing female presence where the male gaze is overturned and women dominate the viewer as a passive spectator. Brice asserts the emboldened feminine form by revisiting the collective social resistance of nineteenth and early twentieth-century French painting.
Lisa Brice, Untitled, 2025, pigment and natural water soluble binders on linen. Credit line: © Lisa Brice. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Katie Morrison
The works are placed in three distinct groups across the exhibition space, providing carefully curated snapshots into worlds unknown, windows into lifestyles that teeter on the edges of guilty pleasures, signalled by wisps of cigarette smoke seen through hollowed, slit eyes. Collective protagonists interact in enclosed spaces, drawing on a deeply charged Parisian socio-political climate. Bar scenes feature in a majority of Brice’s works, echoing Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, (1882); typically a male-dominated space - particularly in fin-de-siecle Paris - Brice reimagines it as a recreational setting for women to indulge in smoking and drinking. The artist’s art-historical influences are far-reaching, ranging from Degas to Manet, from Gentileschi to Vallotton, as she restages, refashions and reframes figures as part of a shift between subject to author.
In one composition, a cat can be seen lapping at a pool of liquid, at first a gentle relief from the fight scenes. But on closer observation, the pupilless eyes of its reflection appear sinister. As such, it shares the empty gaze - literal and figurative - of Brice’s female figures. The French word for cat – chatte - not only makes a provocative reference to female genitalia but is also reminiscent of another Manet painting, this time Olympia (1863), where the eponymous figure, a prostitute, sits proud in her agency, opposing objectification by the male viewer or artist. The feline figure is as sensual as she is independent.
Lisa Brice, Untitled, 2025. Watercolour and Flashe on Claybord © Lisa Brice. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Katie Morrison.
Lisa Brice, Untitled, 2025. Watercolour and Flashe on Claybord © Lisa Brice. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Katie Morrison.
Whilst confident, Brice’s figures are quietly intimate; they flit in and out of private and public spaces. The audience learns to navigate their world as acquiescent onlookers. Participation is framed as a dangerous game as these women immerse themselves in their own material desires and self-fashioning. The largest composition, mural-like across its five panels, displays a boxing match and a group of women in front of a shadowed crowd. Some are seen to be posing in front of their own reflections in what appears to be a subtle play on the motif of ‘smoke and mirrors’. A woman admires herself while smoking, almost ‘flexing’, while two play-fighting cats at her feet add to the atmosphere of barbarism that mirrors the physical violence of the match.
Lisa Brice, Untitled, 2025. Pigment and natural water soluble binders on linen (5 Panels) © Lisa Brice. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Katie Morrison.
This imagery runs through Brice’s previous works, specifically her aforementioned cobalt paintings where canvases stand in place of mirrors and the figures hold up paint brushes or palettes as they reclaim their agency and creative independence. Here, the women are equipped with cigarettes instead of paintbrushes as they look back at their own bare reflections with a raw sense of purpose. Verging on vanity, these women appear self-empowered, celebrating their own fleeting forms. In the world Brice creates, divine female energy is never tainted, but instead grows with agency and waits for just the right moment to step into the spotlight, onto the main stage, or even into the centre of a boxing ring. This, Brice shows us, is how the female form keeps its powder dry, holding power in reserve until the most opportune moment.