Deborah Bell (b. 1957) is a contemporary South African painter, printmaker and sculptor. Her earlier more political work has given way to a broader, deeper investigation into the border between mortality and immortality, matter and spirit, presence and absence, the quotidian and the mythic, the grounded and transcendent. In recent years she has developed an immediately recognisable visual language, her images simple, stark, symbolic – grounded, silent, still, poised. In her iconography she draws from a range of cultures and a range of philosophies and psychologies. She is interested in the half-formed image – the unwritten, as yet unformed spaces we move towards in our quest for self-knowledge.
