Bella Levikova is a significant name in Russian abstract art. She participated in the key exhibitions of unofficial art, as well as in the first Sotheby’s auction (1988) in Moscow. Her works are held in the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, the Hermitage Museum (from the collection of Georges Macheret and Nadya Volkonskaya), the New Museum in St. Petersburg, the Nancy and Norton Dodge Collection, the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, the Kolodzei Art Foundation, and other collections.
The formation of Bella Levikova as an artist is closely intertwined with the major events of the Moscow art scene during the era of nonconformism and the post-Soviet period, yet her figure stands apart.

For the generation of the Sixtiers, the landmark year was 1957, when, alongside the VI World Festival of Youth and Students, an exhibition opened at which young artists encountered contemporary international art firsthand for the first time. Among the many exhibition events of the Khrushchev Thaw, the encounter with Abstract Expressionism proved especially overwhelming. The language of abstraction became associated with creative freedom, spiritual liberation, and the possibility of creating a “new reality.” Remarkably, Bella was, in a curious way, absent from the sphere of influence of that exhibition.

Paradoxically, Bella Levikova’s first abstract works emerged through a process of spontaneous self-generation beginning in 1965. This hermeticism constitutes a specific mode of artistic individuality.

An intensive artistic life spanning more than half a century has shaped the artist’s individuality in both temporal and cultural contexts. Yuri Zlotnikov’s Signal System—as a way of constructing an artistic strategy—might have had numerous points of contact with Levikova’s personal evolution. Yet her worldview developed independently of the systems formed within her immediate circle. A particularly significant influence on her development came through her long-standing friendship and creative dialogue with Francisco Infante.

She does not belong to the “keepers of the flame,” with their pathos of publicity, guild-like ritualism, and personal didacticism. Levikova’s creative mechanism functions, one might say, like an internal combustion engine. Impulses, impressions, and ideas are processed in a mode of inward secrecy and then emerge instantaneously as pure authorial energy. In her imagery, it is remarkably difficult to detect either the traces of great predecessors or the formal residues of her contemporaries. As she herself says: “Only out of silence can one retrieve what matters most.”

Bella Levikova sets in motion her unique creative mechanism, within whose depths magnitudes of cosmic scale are compressed by incomprehensible means, only to produce, at the moment of release, the effect of a powerful visual detonation. It is as though she works on fuel with an exceptionally high octane rating. I permit myself this comparison because the exact sciences have always been, for this artist, both a congenial field and an object of constant interest. Interdisciplinary spaces are her native element; she belongs to that rare type of artist for whom “both the ardor of cold numbers and the gift of divine visions” carry equal significance.

Bella has expressed herself across the widest spectrum of abstract art: gestural and structural, geometric and organic, elementary and fractal. What remains her constant quality as an artist is an inability to resort to outward effect, empty surface, or superficial expression. She values long chains of association, the complication of visual language, and the risks of formal experimentation. She combines an interest in the exact sciences with visionary thinking, grants mathematics and poetry equal standing, eagerly engages with the contemporary while simultaneously sensing that “measure is forged in our hearts.” The individuality of the images in her paintings falls within the concept of emergence—the presence within a system of properties that are absent from its individual components. On the one hand, this provides a magnificent opportunity for endless reflection on the nature of art; on the other, the reproduction of a long-standing emergent phenomenon has today become the focal point of AI development and the center of humanity’s attention.

Bella says that she recruits elements from space itself—those that resonate with her frequency and her genetic code. The question “What is the Universe?” remains for her an object of daily inquiry, and few are capable of preserving such acuity of observation and contemplation while balancing between philosophy and poetics. She longs for novelty and is unafraid to venture into the unknown, whether into the depths of cosmic space or the quantum world. Indeed, the variability of visual strategies in Bella’s work is so great that one is tempted to apply to it the term “many-worlds interpretation.” In the quantum dimension, reality branches into multiple worlds, each realizing one possible outcome. The world of her abstract imagery is composed of interpretations of reality obtained simultaneously through mental, emotional, and sensory experience. In other words, through intuition—the oldest mode of cognition.

The high degree of interconnectedness within her color fields and formal structures may at first create an impression of excessive complexity. Yet this proves to be only the first response to encountering an artistic system that is constantly renewing itself. Such selfless readiness for renewal is Bella Levikova’s rare gift—a creator incapable of settling comfortably within her attachment to the language of abstraction. We are able to see the artist’s universe because within it there exists an observer, recording these observations in the language of visual art and sending us their messages.