Paula Rego: Writing drawings, staging
stories
December 5 - November 8, 2020
This exhibition brings together a series of works
that reveal the creative process through which Paula Rego
constructs a unique and personal figurative world, where stories
function as genuine realist structures.
In her multifaceted work, drawing has always
functioned as the source and driving force for her transfiguration
of stories. Presented at this exhibition are a set of the artist's
loose drawings and sketchbooks, some of which have never been seen
in public before. This selection includes a most varied range of
free drawings, model drawings and composition drawings establishing
the coordinates of a final work that is customarily produced
through the techniques of painting or engraving. But, to a large
extent, these drawings are spontaneous graphic realisations, firmly
established ideas that are either reaffirmed or even eliminated and
which only have a place on that piece of paper, setting themselves
up as direct translations of an emotional experience into picture
form, revealing an intimate process of visuality.
From the 1990s onwards, the spectacular dimension
that is to be noted in the way she constructs the works gives them
the status of genuine tableaux vivants, where the stories that are
told begin to be staged, represented and reinterpreted in her
studio, gaining their own life through live models who follow the
artist's perceptions and her own version of the stories. When she
doesn't find the ideal model, Rego creates her three-dimensional
figure with a materiality fabricated through her own imagination
and with the same artistic impulse. This creative process of
staging is brought to the exhibition through the presence of models
and other scenic elements.
Prominence is also given to Paula Rego's most recent
work, Orgulho /Pride (from the
Seven Deadly Sins series), which is being
exhibited for the first time in Portugal. This three-dimensional
work, made of papier mâché, and a variety
of materials and fabrics, offers us a life-size representation of
the queen consort of France, Marie Antoinette (1755-1793). It is
certainly the result of a work of continuity with the fantastic
creatures that she produced between 1977 and 1978. During this
period, the artist created a series of fabric dolls representing
characters from folk tales: The pregnant
princess; The perfect
prince; The Princess
Pea; The three golden heads
and Puss in Boots. The complexity
of this new sculptural work, which includes other smaller-sized
figures, was also the result of the natural evolution of her
process of constructing the models used to figure in the
paintings.
Curatorship: Catarina Alfaro