Chimera ,2009
Provenance : Everard Read, Johannesburg.
Notes : A chimera is a mythical creature with the physical attributes of different animals in a single form. In the present lot, the chimera has a human head and torso with the legs and tail of a lion. In the catalogue to her remarkable 2015 exhibition at Everard Read (Johannesburg and Cape Town), Dreams of Immortality, Bell speaks about depictions of animals in her work – lions, dogs and horses – to express notions of power and vulnerability. The animals are both guardians of the soul and intermediaries linking the physical and the spiritual worlds. Sometimes she represents a figure riding the animal and sometimes, as in the present lot, the human and animal attributes merge to become a creature that is part mortal, part god, representing the artist’s physical self and her higher self. The artist emphasises this creature’s mythical nature by depicting it anachronistically in the ‘flying gallop’ pose with all four legs outstretched, a physical impossibility, but ubiquitous in art before Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photographs were published in the late nineteenth century making it possible for animal locomotion to be fully understood for the first time. Here this pose contributes to the sense that the chimera is located in the mythical past.
