Strauss & co - 9 November 2015, Johannesburg

204 272 Deborah Margaret BELL south african 1957 – Four Horsemen each signed and numbered 9/9 bronze with a dark brown patina, mounted on a Perspex base heights: 32, 31, 28 and 24 cm, excluding bases (4) R1 200 000 – 1 600 000 Figures of horses and riders recur throughout Deborah Bell’s work. A West African-derived example inspired by a carving on a wooden staff appears on the cover of the TAXI art book dedicated to her, the first significant overview of her work 1 . It’s an apt choice because figures of horses and riders in Bell’s work often represent travellers on spiritual journeys, whether they are magi, as on the TAXI monograph cover, warriors, hunters or Arthurian Knights searching for the Holy Grail. ‘[A]nyone who consciously embarks on a spiritual journey is an alchemist of the self,’ Bell once said in an interview 2 . She sees her practice as an artist very much as alchemy of the self, and the task of the artist as akin to embarking on a spiritual journey. The mystical spirituality that informs Bell’s approach involves a search for transcendence, a journey inward to find a more universal self, or as Pippa Stein puts it in the monograph, ‘a process of ‘unearthing’, of peeling off skins of the self to reveal the inner ‘Self’ which holds the truth to life’s mysteries’ 3 . For Bell, the artist’s journey often involves following an invisible path. She also refers to the spiritual ‘point of crossing’ between physical and spiritual worlds, which she describes as ‘infinite space expanding beyond in both directions’ 4 . These Four Horsemen ‘with that sense of horse and rider becoming one’ 5 , supported by transparent Perspex plinths, gallop through just such empty ‘void-like space’ 6 . They are messengers from another world of mythology and spirituality. ‘In Kotoko culture, the horse and rider talismans are seen as guardians of the soul,’ Bell notes 7 . The universality of the horse in the iconography and mythology of so many cultures makes them a potent subject for Bell,