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Deborah Bell
at Spirit Studios Suffolk, Gallery II,
8 June - 3 August
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Deborah Bell is one of South Africa's most celebrated contemporary artists. She works across a range of media, from clay to bronze to canvas, paper and dry point etching. Her earlier more political work has given way to a broader, deeper investigation into the space between mortality and immortality, matter, spirit and the mythic. In recent years she has developed an immediately recognisable visual language: images simple and symbolic, grounded, silent and still.Taking place this summer at Spirit Studios in Suffolk, we are delighted to host the largest European survey of sculpture and painting by acclaimed South African artist, Deborah Bell. Held in partnership with the Everard Read Gallery, the exhibition spans the last 25 years of Bell's career and includes her monumental figure of Artemis, last seen at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2012 as well as five figures from the artist's Unearthed series from 2000. For opening times and further information please click here.
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Artemis at dawn, Spirit Studios, Suffolk
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‘Artemis is the warrior woman. The huntress – bow in hand, forever striding forward. Her arrows arc into the future. She has great purpose, and I can see that as an archetype she has helped me travel far.’
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"I see these figures as resurrections - resurrections of histories and ideas that we have forgotten”
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Her iconography draws from a range of cultures (African, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek,early Christian and European) and encompasses a broad range of philosophies(especially the Buddhist preoccupation with stillness), yet going still deeper, finding answers through the prism of experiences that Bell has learned as an artist, woman and explorer. Bell’s earlier figures, characterised by a sense of entrapment (both in her country and her body), became figures embodying the seeker, often placed with boats, horses or chariots. Lions, dogs, horses and angels are recurring images, often acting as intermediary figures between the physical world and the spiritual. Inevitably her work betrays aspects of herself, sometimes revealed through those powerful daemons that reside in all of us, or the solitary female figures, some full of assertive confidence, others more vulnerable and less sure of their agency.
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Deborah Bell, Sculpture and Painting 2000–23
8 June – 3 August 2024
John Martin Gallery and Everard Read GalleryExhibition at Spirit Studios, Benhall,Saxmundham, Suffolk, IP17 1JJThursday to Saturday 10 –5pmT +44 (0)20 7499 1314 Enquiries spiritstudios@jmlondon.com instagram updates @spiritstudios_suffolk
Deborah Bell: Sculpture and Painting: 2000 - 2023
Current viewing_room
