Freddie Brice

1920-1998 · New York, USA

He started painting at 63 in a Manhattan workshop and found his voice immediately: huge black-and-white images with the punch of a billboard and the calm of a hymn.

The life

Brice was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1920 and moved to Harlem at nine, where he haunted the Apollo Theater. He worked as an elevator operator, in laundries and as a ship painter at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and endured long periods of incarceration and institutionalisation along the way. In 1983 he began painting at an art workshop on the Upper West Side, and his 1991 showing in the exhibition Art’s Mouth introduced the work to the wider world. He died in New York in 1998.

The work

Acrylic on plywood panels, mostly in black and white: clocks, watches, ships, chairs, animals and jewellery, each subject reduced to its graphic essence, with black and white flipping between positive and negative. The paintings carry an urban minimalism and immediacy that few trained artists ever manage. His work is held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Museum of Everything in London.

Why we love them

One clock, two colours, no fuss. Brice shows how much painting you can make with almost nothing added.

Go deeper

• Freddie Brice at the Outsider Art Fair
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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