Paula Rego: The
80's
13 december 2018 - 26 may 2019
Exhibition prolonged until 23th of June
2019
The exhibition Paula Rego: The 80s brings together a vast
group of works from that decade, most of which are now to be found
in private collections. This period coincided with a number of
personal, social and artistic changes that aroused in Rego a sense
of freedom in regard to the expectations imposed on her about the
way of "making art". These changes led to a reformulation of her
working process (the narrative universe and the formal treatment of
her works). Her desire for artistic liberation, for "doing things
more directly", would lead her into a space of greater proximity to
herself, to her life beyond painting. The presence of these
emotions and her confrontation with them through painting
established a radically new visual language for telling her
stories, creating a complex and ambiguous universe in which animals
were creatures with human qualities and behaviours, thrust into
peculiar situations, vivid dramas that noisily invaded her
painting.
For this reason, the complex plots that she creates in her
paintings can only be revealed between the lines. The ambiguity is
reinforced by the duplicitous condition that Paula Rego confers
upon the animals that she portrays and that, on the one hand,
preserve their singularity, while, on the other, they further
combine this with their humanisation, founded on relational
stereotypes. And the animals can be used in this way because human
emotions are easily recognisable in them through the associations
that come from popular culture, especially from fables, and which
are established immediately.
In all of these works in which the animal is presented as our
other, seen from the outside or from the inside, in any of the
stories narrated by Rego, there is always a questioning, but also a
crude and frequently brutal revelation of human nature and the
relationships that humans establish between one another, whether
they are based on family, love or politics. The artist makes use of
the nature of animals to strip the narratives of any reductive
sentimentalism.
Curatorship: Catarina Alfaro