H R Bell at Francis Kyle Gallery

H R Bell was born in Streatley-on-Thames in 1976, great-granddaughter of Frank Gascoigne Heath, a noted painter of the Newlyn School known in his day as the ‘sunshine artist’. In 2000 she graduated from the Courtauld Institute with a first class honours degree in history of art, having specialised in Russian painting and sculpture in the twentieth century. She went on to study at the Surikov Institute in Moscow (2002) and the Repin Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg (2003). Since 2004 Bell has held exhibitions in Henley-on-Thames, Winchester and Truro and has also shown in New York. Represented by Francis Kyle Gallery since 2008, she was a major participant in the Gallery’s 2009 autumn theme exhibition, That gong-tormented Sea: contemporary painters explore the idea and the reality of Byzantium, in preparation for which she spent five months in Istanbul. First one-person exhibition with Francis Kyle Gallery Spring 2011.