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This exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculpture explores Bell’s alter ego, Kala: a monstrous fur-covered female hominid who is impossibly beautiful, transcendent, comical, erotic and horrific.

These sublimely oedipal self-portraits reveal a fully self-actualized being who is at once psychologically complex, in full possession of her rich inner world and femininity, intimidating and existing in a surreally beautiful fantasyland, longingly struggling to be accepted, understood and loved.

Bell has created a subject that could serve as a divine and transgressive embodiment of the history of art.

Kala is a contemporary Venus, emerging from a sea of culture and our deepest memories, confronting our belief systems and definitions of beauty, societal acceptance and self-awareness. She exists as a dark mirror to all the nudes, nymphs and muses of art history.

Kala is also a rebuttal to the clichéd pornography that has saturated contemporary art; she is the Jungian shadow that our culture has cast in our idealization and distortion of femininity.