Bell retrospective paired with Sterling's biting new paintings — SkimNews
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- Quentin Bell (d. 1996), son of Vanessa Bell and nephew of Virginia Woolf, is the subject of an exhibition featuring decades of ceramics, plates, figurines and drawings devoted to magic and levitation.
- Bell's levitation obsession began at age 9 when he saw a floating woman at a magic show, inspiring five sculptures of airborne bodies in wire, wood and plaster (1960s), bronze (1980s) and painted ceramics (1990s).
- The review criticizes Bell's figurines and drawings as 'poorly rendered' and 'pretty unremarkable,' though it frames his anachronistic style — outside the austere minimalism of contemporaries like Bernard Leach — as charming eccentricity.
- Olivia Sterling's new paintings run alongside Bell's, using the language of old cartoons and comics to deliver biting critiques of race, the human body and power dynamics.
- Sterling's canvases include a woman transformed into a dining table strewn with cake and milk, a corpse littered with ice-creams and a triptych depicting a white body in a magician's sword box with Black women plunging swords in.
- The reviewer argues Sterling connects magic and power as 'fundamentally the same thing: an illusion, a world maintained through artifice,' and calls her work 'way better' than Bell's.
Why it matters: The reviewer's verdict is unambiguous: Sterling is 'way better' than Bell, and the exhibition hands Bell's levitation-and-magic obsession to a younger artist who weaponizes it into political critique. Sterling gains the visibility of a Bloomsbury-era pairing while Bell's charm serves as a soft entry into harder-edged contemporary work — a curatorial format that uses one artist's weakness to amplify another's strength.
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