Although Lisa Brice's solo exhibition at Tate Britain is part of the gallery's Art Now series, which focuses on emerging artists, it's a bit strange for South Africans to think of her as "emerging".
She was already considered quite a prodigy here in the 1990s, when, straight out of art school, her uncanny sensitivity to the undercurrents of danger and violence in so many everyday public and private spaces, from airports to living rooms, shot her to fame.
She went on to explore Bangkok 's sex entertainment industry, gang violence, and the workings of state and commercial power with similarly eerie acuity.
While she left South Africa for the UK in 1999 and has worked in London and the Caribbean ever since, she's exhibited regularly in South Africa over the years, so her presence is still felt here.
In recent years she's concentrated on paintings, often exploring her earlier themes, but in a more complex, ambiguous way.
The exhibition at Tate Britain includes recent work, produced over the past two and a half years, along the lines we've seen her exploring in recent exhibitions here and in the UK and US.
In fact, these are the works that caught the eye of Clarrie Wallis, head curator of modern and contemporary British art at Tate. "[She] invited me to participate in the Art Now programme after she visited my studio twice while work was under way for my show in New York with Salon94 Gallery, some of which was included in the Tate exhibition," says Brice.
The paintings in the show are mainly figural works, mostly in a vibrant cobalt blue, and often loaded with art historical references. "They are a continuation of ideas I have touched on throughout my practice that have evolved from single figure studies to the more complicated compositions found in the large paintings on the show," she says.While some of these figures are drawn from personal observation and experience, many are recognisable types familiar from the likes of Degas and his women bathing and the broader conventions of the female nude in Western art. Brice calls her engagement with them "both a homage and a readdressing of selected art historical works".
By painting certain images or following certain art-historical conventions - "re-authoring the work as by a woman" as she put it in the exhibition leaflet in an interview with her curator Aïcha Mehrez - she reclaims those conventions.Sometimes there's an overt attempt to disrupt the way we look at the women in her pictures. Brice has deployed "the somewhat alarming confrontation of a hissing cat" as a way to "potentially interrupt a voyeuristic gaze" in some of her works. But that cat also has a complex art-historical provenance. It is drawn from Manet's Olympia, a famous reclining nude that caused havoc in 1865 when it was shown at the Paris Salon because of its sitter's bold, direct attitude.
It's also a reference to a thread of influence that runs all the way from Titian's Venus of Urbino, dating back to 1538, via Manet to Felix Vallotton's 1913 painting The White and the Black, which is a response to Manet's Olympia.
But it's not all art-historical sleuthing. Brice is an insightful observer of the way in which figures can communicate through their body language. Her ability to portray the nuances of attitude and expression is masterful. She refers to the figures in her painting being self-possessed, a quality that makes them hard to ogle because of their obliviousness to or disregard of the viewer.
Brice has them inhabit ambiguous in-between spaces, and her use of blue creates another layer of ambiguity. "The unnatural colour of the figures' skin interrupts a preconditioned read or perception of the figurative information," she says of her choice to depict her figures in blue.
She also associates it with the in-between, transitional blue of dusk, and the sense of uncertainty she prizes.
Because ultimately, the empowerment she manages to give back to the figures in her work - and from the tradition of Western art - come not just from the way her paintings give them a presence, but from the way they remain ambiguous, and escape knowing.
• Árt Now: Lisa Brice' is on at Tate Britain until August 27 2018..