Dirk Bell’s intimate figurative drawings and paintings unveil a new way of depicting and perceiving sensuality, like an evanescent but still present memory. In works such as the delicate Rabbit’s Moon (2007), with its illusion of a watery craquelure all over its surface, and the darker, more violently rendered Wolf Hamlet Madonna Elmex (2006), the artist revisits traditional genres and compositions – the memento mori still life, the symbolic representation of the human figure – filtering and compressing art historical references with a contemporary sense of dismantlement and disintegration.