American journalist and social activist, Gloria Steinem, celebrated her 90^th birthday with the launch of the Gloria Steinem Foundation in New York City. Steinem describes the Foundation as “an incubator for activism.”

Deborah Bell’s Unearthed III bronze figure sits in the heart of the Foundation’s newly renovated gardens. Following Steinem’s first encounter with the sculpture a decade ago in South Africa, friends and colleagues worked behind the scenes to find and bring the sculpture to NYC to mark this milestone.

NBC New York profiled the launch of the Foundation and the unveiling of the sculpture in a news reel available to view here.

DEBORAH BELL (b. 1957, South Africa)

Deborah Bell is one of South Africa’s most celebrated contemporary artists. She works in a range of media on canvas and paper, produces dry point etchings and large-scale bronzes. 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 her iconography she draws from a range of cultures (including African, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, early Christian and European) and a range of philosophies (especially the Buddhist preoccupation with stillness and the shedding of attachment and the ego) and psychologies (more Jung than Freud) – but her work digs deeper, arriving finally out of an internal and personal place that Bell occupies in the world as an artist, a woman and an explorer.

Unearthed I – VII is a sold-out series of 7 monumental bronze figures dating from 2000 - 2001. Five Unearthed works from the artist’s personal collection will be exhibited at Spirit Studios in Suffolk between June – August 2024, seen pictured below, alongside a selection of paintings and other monumental sculptures.

Please find more information about the exhibition on our website here or contact us at the gallery.