Paula Rego @ Tate Britain, London - Retrospective Exhibition

Paula Rego

Tate Britain, London

7 July – 24 October 2021

Tate Britain presents the UK's largest and most comprehensive retrospective of the work of Paula Rego. An uncompromising artist of extraordinary imaginative power, Paula Rego (b.1935) redefined figurative art and revolutionised the way in which women are represented. This exhibition will tell the story of this artist’s remarkable life, highlighting the personal nature of much of her work and the socio-political context in which it is rooted. It will reveal her broad range of references, from comic strips to history paintings. Featuring over 100 works including collage, paintings, large-scale pastels, drawings and etchings, it will span Rego’s early work from the 1950s to her richly layered, staged scenes from the 2000s.

The exhibition will begin with a selection of Rego’s rarely seen early works in which the artist first explored personal as well as social struggle. In Interrogation 1950, painted at fifteen years of age, Paula Rego asserted her commitment to denouncing injustices and standing up for victims. In her paintings, collages and drawings from the 1960s to 70s, Rego passionately and fiercely opposed the Portuguese dictatorship, using a range of sources for inspiration including advertisements, caricatures and news stories. She also explored folk tales as representations of human psyche and behaviour, as with Brancaflor – The Devil and the Devil’s Wife in Bed 1975.

Paula Rego abandoned collage in 1980 and returned to painting, combining childhood memories with her experiences as a woman, wife and lover. The exhibition will include major paintings from this period such as examples from ‘The Vivian Girls’ series, in which girls rebel against a coercive society, and the seminal works that established Rego’s reputation when first exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in 1988 including The Policeman’s Daughter 1987. Many of these pictures relate to Rego’s intense relationship with her husband, the painter Victor Willing, who for many years suffered from multiple sclerosis and died in 1988.

Throughout her career, Paula Rego has been fascinated with storytelling and this imbues much of her work. The exhibition will include prints from her series Nursery Rhymes 1989 in which Rego explores the strangeness and cruelty of traditional British children’s songs. As the first artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, Rego also took inspiration from art history, weaving references to old masters such as Hogarth and Velázquez into paintings in which the protagonists are women, exploring their struggle and their journey towards emancipation, as in The Artist in Her Studio 1993.

The exhibition will feature Rego’s large pastels of single, female figures from the 1990s to 2000s, including the ‘Dog Woman’ and ‘Abortion’ series, some of the artist’s most celebrated and arresting pictures. Works from the ‘Abortion’ series, which the artist was proud to see used to campaign for the legalisation of abortion in Portugal, depict women in the aftermath of illegal abortions. Possession 2004, another major series of pastels rarely exhibited, combines Rego’s personal experience of depression and therapy with inspiration from 19th century staged photographs of women diagnosed as suffering from ‘hysteria’.

The exhibition will invite visitors into Rego’s creative world and explore the mise-en-scènes that the artist has been setting up, drawing and painting in her studio throughout the 2000s. Seminal paintings from this period will include War 2003 and The Pillowman 2004. The exhibition will also bring together striking works addressing the issues of women’s trafficking and female genital mutilation. These powerful images confront difficult stories of pain and abuse that Rego feels need to be told.

Paula Rego is curated by Elena Crippa, Curator, Modern & Contemporary Art, with Zuzana Flašková, Assistant Curator, Modern & Contemporary British Art, Tate Britain. It is organised by Tate Britain in collaboration with Kunstmuseum Den Haag. It will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue from Tate Publishing.

TATE BRITAIN, LONDON

www.tate.org.uk

Paula Rego @ La Virreina Image Centre, Barcelona

Paula Rego: Family Sayings
La Virreina Image Centre, Barcelona
8 July - 8 October 2017

Heir to Goya’s expressionism and Hogarth’s mordant wit, the work of Paula Rego (Lisbon, 1935) has, over more than half a century, built an enduring fable on human nature. The artist’s paintings and drawings explore in detail how women organise spaces of historical disobedience against the cultural imaginaries imposed by the patriarchy.

The work of Paula Rego could be read as a great fable on human behaviour. Thus, the connections between dominion and dependency, anger in response to social injustices, the persecution of irreverent bodies and sexuality constrained by conservative moral standards are subjects that reappear cyclically in her paintings and imbue them with a certain existential character. In addition, Rego’s works establish an acerbic dialogue with history and the immediate present; they dispute the cultural legacy of the patriarchy; and they speak out against the aggressions perpetrated by the hierarchies of power. Over the course of her career lasting more than half a century, she has—through metaphors and broadsides, and by combining literary tales and personal experiences—created an energetic and anti-normative imaginary peopled with beings that leap from stupor to indiscipline, from coldness to violence.

Paula Rego’s artistic evolution is a veritable melting pot of disparities and reformulations. Her early pieces use an abstract language akin to that of Vieira da Silva and Dubuffet, while her later work, close to the School of London—Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Auerbach and Andrews, among others—should be seen as heir to the expressionism of Goya and the sarcasm of Hogarth, together with Daumier and Gutiérrez Solana, and in keeping with the unsettling atmospheres of Balthus and the refined obscenity of Klossowski.

Unlike earlier artists, however, Pola Rego is not only more open to other sources outside of painting—for example, the theatre, opera, popular narratives and film—but has also engaged in a kind of far-reaching exploration of the way women have organised their spaces of historical dissidence.

Family Sayings, which takes its title from the novel of the same name by Natalia Ginzburg, is an exhibition that examines six decades of Paula Rego’s work: a period that extends from her drawings of the 1950s to a number of recent projects and which includes her series on the subject of abortion, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, and Misericordia, by Benito Pérez Galdós, as well as the pieces inspired by the plays of Martin McDonagh.

Curator: Valentín Roma

La Virreina Centre de la Imatge
Palau de la Virreina
La Rambla, 99. 08002 Barcelona
http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat