A powerful original female voice, Paula Rego is one of Europe’s most sought-after artists, with ever increasing international acclaim. Her intensely complex visual narratives, played out in masterful paintings, etchings and drawings, evoke a thrilling discomfort in the viewer. Unafraid to challenge her audience with her creations of a beautiful grotesque, Rego’s works have come to embody a social and political position that is upheld by her own self-avowed feminism. Born in Portugal, Rego grew up learning by heart the fairy tales and folklore stories that were taught to instill a moral compass – something that seems inherently and ironically subverted in Rego’s interpretations – and her works continued looking to fictional stories that hold a raw truth.
The characters who live in Rego’s works are predominantly female, struggling against or overcoming battles of will and power that are more often than not, inflicted by males. In Rego’s Jane Eyre series she explores what one might read between the lines of the novel – hidden sexual tension, the repression of one of Western literature’s most complex female characters. That women form a disproportionate part of the focus of her anger is natural, not because Rego is a woman and staunchly pro women’s-rights, but because women have always been – and largely still are – the prime vicitims of daily cruelties practiced at their expense. Rego has taken on some of the biggest taboos circling female social politics; abortion, genital mutilation, sex trafficking; and with the much larger social battles; war itself.
Rego’s etchings, seen here in The British Cut, are executed in monochrome and printed in editions of 35. A group of proofs are then taken and hand-coloured by the artist, in varied colours. Such is Rego’s mastery of this medium, that by altering the colours but not the outline she can alter the mood of the subject and thus its concepts.
Rego’s exhibition history includes: Serpentine Gallery, London, Marlborough Fine Art, London and New York, Tate Gallery Liverpool, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Tate Britain, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais, Portugal. Amongst others, Rego has 43 works in the collection of the British Council, 10 works in the collection of the Arts Council of England, and 46 works in the Tate Gallery, London.
