Bell Toll

Technique: Canvas, oil.
Size: 117 × 106 cm.

"The Ringing of the Bell" belongs to the Moscow period of Evgenia Gorchakova (b. 1950, Kirov), shortly before the artist left Russia to work in Paris and Oldenburg from the early 1990s. The motif of bell sound is rendered in paint in an abstract key: the artist seeks a way to give visible form to sound and its gradually fading resonance. This attention to the "sound" of colour and line relates to the tradition of Wassily Kandinsky, in whose 125th-anniversary exhibition in Moscow Gorchakova took part in 1991. Her later effort to translate the intangible – above all time and its duration – into stable painterly "structures" would become the foundation of her mature work.