Limited Edition – Deborah Bell, ‘Reveal’

Deborah Bell is a leading painter, sculptor and printmaker in South Africa. While her early work was more political, she is more recently concerned with worlds in between. The realm between mortality and immortality, matter and spirit, presence and absence, the quotidian and the mythic, the grounded and transcendent. Bell has noted, of her practice -The idea of an artist as a magician delights me. It is about alchemy and the turning of base material into gold. Her work is fundamentally informed by a personal search for the Self and she often draws on spiritual imagery from a wide range of sources. Multi-layered references and connection to ancient sources and memories is linked to her spiritual beliefs and how she defines herself as an artist in Africa. This continuity of form and content within her oeuvre allows the possible meanings within her work to reach beyond the personal search of the artist herself. She is the winner of multiple awards and her works lie in numerous collections, including the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg Museum of Modern Art, New York National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian Institute.

Reveal is based on the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez, created in 1656. A couple of years ago William Kentridge suggested that she revisit this theme – explored in her We Will Never Know What We Are, which hangs in her guest bathroom and dates back to the early 1990s. Bell made a series of sketches in her notebooks – her primary source material for her etchings – from her visit to the Museu Picasso in Barcelona which houses a series of 58 paintings done by Pablo Picasso in 1957, reinterpreting and recreating Las Meninas. The image of the young Spanish Infanta, Margaret Theresa, a symbol of youth and innocence for Bell, appears in several of her prints and paintings. It was while sketching from Picasso’s paintings in Barcelona that the image of the cloaked figure in the doorway emerged, symbolising another sense of self, a future sense of self, beckoning similar to the angel in Annunciation. This cloaked figure at some point transformed into the winged angel seen in the work. For Bell it is ambiguous as to whether the two figures in the foreground are aware of the angel. Bell also points out the moment of mutual recognition that is passing between the two figures in the seconds after the tray is dropped.

Deborah Bell, ‘Reveal’, 2014, chine colle, drypoint and roulette spitbite, 49.5×37.8cm, Edition of 40.

WARNING. Keep out of direct sunlight. Handle with extreme care as works on paper are easily creased, bent or torn. Store in a dry, climate controlled facility.

This work is couriered rolled in a protective tube or flat on a protective backing board. Frame with non-acidic archival materials.