Lisa Fogarty is a self-taught artist who paints and creates collage works centered on women, reworking archetypes from comic books and vintage magazines into complex, empowered figures. She calls this approach the female gaze, and traces it to a childhood obsession with comic book girls. Her work often begins as physical collage and watercolor before being scanned, digitally reworked and sold as an NFT.
Fogarty has a background in social work, and her pieces often draw on attachment theory and Jungian archetypes. A set of works titled "UGLY", "SLUT" and "WHORE" revisits words she cut into her own skin as a teenager, made to destigmatize self-harm. She has collected vintage women's magazines since 2015, some dating to 1896, and overpaints their pages into collages that set modern womanhood against these older images. The illustrators John Bauer and Elsa Beskow, along with Gustav Klimt's colors and patterns, are among her stated influences.
