DEBORAH BELL

On first sight the art of Deborah Bell, whose draftsmanship is impeccable, appears (by contemporary standards) rather conservative. Her stylistic references look back to the work of French Realists, to Max Beckmann, to Titian, and to the occasional African sculptor. Upon closer inspection Bell recombines these sources in the manner of postmodernist pastiche and the context of her art is particularly South African and Feminist. She has collaborated with fellow South Africans Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge over the last decade on exhibitions of print series which rework images by William Hogarth and Alfred Jarry. In each case she has added new life and local flavor to the ideas of earlier European artists whose work was considered radical in their day.

Bell’s imagery is shot through with disturbing evocations of sexuality gone awry, or of social injustice read through the metaphor of out-of –control passion. In her remaking of Hogarth’s “Marriage-a-la-Mode,” Bell turned this now classic series into a biting critique of the loose manners of the White middle class in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs.

Bell’s eclectic approach to her craft reflects her openness to many different styles as sources of inspiration. The impact of Japanese art on her pottery is just one of these influences.

Excerpt from Standard Bank National Arts Festival Souvenir Programme 29 June – 11 July 1999.
Artists in Residence, p.104

An internationally acclaimed award-winning artist, Deborah Bell relies on a range of media to convey her messages and meanings, from painting, drawing, printmaking and animation to – more recently – ceramics and ceramic sculpture. She is as adept at creating sets of graphics and etchings as she is at contributing to installations and movie sequences.

She comes from Johannesburg, where she studied for her BA and her BA Hons at the University of the Witwatersrand and completed her MA in Fine Art in 1986. Around that time she lectured in art at a tertiary level at various institutions, including Wits and Unisa. She has traveled extensively in Africa, North America and Europe. In 1986 she spent two months working at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris.

With Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge, Bell was involved in one of the key exhibitions at the 1997 Festival, producing a series of eight graphics around the theme of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. Using what curator Fiona Rankin-Smith referred to as “wily and complex references to West and Central African carving and ceramic works,” her version of the Ubu figure penetrated Africa and left chaos.

Alone and with other artists, she has held numerous shows since 1982, often collaborating with Kentridge and Hodgins. Together they have experimented with computer animation, laser prints and drawing – in 1992’s Easing the Passing (of the hours) – and blended their etchings with the movement of video in 1994’s Memo, where they used drawn and acted animation. Collaborations 1986-1997, at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, celebrated their joint creations.

Last year, Bell held a significant solo exhibition called Displacements at the Goodman Gallery in Gauteng. She also took part in EarthHues, an initiative of the WorldSpace Corporation in Washington, DC. Her work has been seen locally and in the United Kingdom, the USA, Canada, France, Germany and Holland, and it is represented in public and private collections here and abroad.

Excerpt from the press release from: Objects of power: memory of metal, memory of wood exhibition, 18 August to 8 September 2007 Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Since 1997 Bell has been concerned with elaborating the artist’s debt to history, both as a visual and spiritual reference. Following on her examination of West African colonial and traditional images in her interpretation of Alfred Jarry’s character ‘Ubu Roi’ for the French play’s centenary, Bell has engaged in expanding the metaphor of a journey for the development of her art. Through her Displacements, Unearthed, and Sentinels exhibitions, she has examined the continued layering of history in the great iconic images of past civilizations. The interdependence of spiritual and cultural values and the way in which successive generations of civilizations have ‘borrowed’ and built upon the visual expressions of these has informed an evolution of Bell’s figures for a decade.

Deborah Bell has shown us warriors battling shadows and mythic creatures, silent guardians and spirit guides, struggling to emerge from earth or water, journeying horsemen and figures borne along by boats or on the heads of godlike giants. Using clay, chalk pastel, gold leaf, watercolour or bronze has been determined by what strength and substance she wished her figures to convey- spirits have appeared to be wraith-like and distant in watercolour, demigods to appear sleeping in clay and bronze- more a monument to the past than vigourous in the here and now.

Object of Power brings a sense of culmination to all these journeys: an artist more at home with her clay and paper, more assured of the triumph of the spirit. These drawings of horsemen are not borne quietly along nor are they seen as weary of the trip. Strong, painterly marks reveal warriors in full charge of their steeds; and bronze queens are no longer on guard, but quietly meditating their universe from above. Here are bronze maces full of status and authority, and gilded images on paper full of the treasures of the past, but now displayed as the point of a journey, a destination.

The exhibition is full of work which speaks of both peace and victory, still in motion, but with the vigour of an artist in full flood; a thinker whose journey can by definition, never be over; but which has entered a new phase.