Bela Gold

Bela Gold's Archive-Dr. Karen Cordero

Bela Gold's work is astonishing due to the beauty of its workmanship and the ominous quality of its sources. Working with images obtained from documents linked to the Holocaust, traces of individual human presences long gone, she produces objects which transmute their material nature on a formal level. She uses traditional media as well as new technologies in order to give renewed significance to graphics, inscriptions and visages which allude to the memory of the unspeakable, thus facilitating the viewers aesthetic compenetration with these images, through a connection based primarily on texture and color.

Although absence is her conceptual starting point, the center of Bela's work is the body and the senses, the basic elements of presence. The materials she uses---stone, paper, animal hides, recycled wood and leather---refer us to the nature and richness of the sensorial experience, while at the same time evoking the inscription of time in matter by combining sophisticated procedures of digital manipulation with artisanal elements and processes. The spatial disposition and the dimensions of her work demand an involvement of our whole body in its perception: not only our eyesight but als...

Bela Gold holds a doctorate in Design and New Technologies from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, a Post- Doctorate in process , 17, Critic studies Institute, Mexico; M.A. in Visual Arts from the National University of Mexico (UNAM); and a B.A. in Fine Arts from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.
Since 1979, she has been a professor-researcher at UAM-A. and won the PROMEP-SEP performance award for the period from 2003-2014
She has received the following awards: Honorable Mention for the Herman Sctruck Illustration Prize in Israel in 1975; Painting Prize at the 1st Nestlé National Painting Biennial, Mexico, 1992; Omnilife Grand Prize 2000, Guadalajara, Jalisco, for Illustration/Engraving and honorable mention in the 2nd Alfredo Zalce National Painting and Engraving Biennial, Michoacán, Mexico. She won the PROMEP-SEP Prize for 2003-2010.

She was a grantholder of the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes for the Exchange of Artistic Residences between Mexico and Canada at the Banff Center for the Arts and a Member of the National System for Art Creators on two occasions: 2001-2004 and 2004-2007
She obtained a doctorate in Design and Visual Arts, New Technologies in 2009, from the Universidad Au...