Paula Rego's work at the Museo Picasso Málaga

The Museu Picasso Málaga presents the work of Paula Rego (b. 1935), an incorruptible artist of extraordinary imagination who has redefined figurative art and revolutionized the representation of women. The exhibition refers to his remarkable career, highlighting the autobiographical nature of much of his art, the socio-political context in which he sinks his roots and the wide range of landmarks, from comics to painting. history. Through more than eighty works, including collages, paintings, large-format cakes, drawings and etchings, the journey ranges from his work in the 1960s to the richly structured and layered scenes of the first two decades of this century.

His paintings, collages and drawings from the 1960s and 1970s are passionately and fiercely opposed to the Portuguese dictatorship, using a variety of sources of inspiration, including advertisements, cartoons and press releases. Folk tales about representations of the human psyche and behavior are also explored, such as Blancaflor, The Demon and His Wife in Bed (1975). In 1980 Rego left collage and returned to painting, combining childhood memories with his experiences as a wife, wife and lover.

The exhibition features important works from that era: examples from the Vivian Girls series, where girls rebel against a coercive society, and seminal paintings that underpinned the artist's fame. Throughout her career, Rego has been fascinated by storytelling. The exhibition includes engravings from his Nursery Rhymes series (1989), in which he immersed himself in the strangeness and cruelty of traditional British children's songs. As the first resident artist at the National Gallery, Rego has also been inspired by art history, weaving allusions to masters such as Hogarth and Velázquez in paintings where the protagonists are women and the focus is on his struggle for emancipation, such as The Artist in His Studio (1993).

Part of the exhibition is also the large cakes of isolated female figures that Rego made during the 1990s and 2000s, in series such as Abortion, the source of some of his best known and most striking images. Those in the series Abortion, which the artist was proud to see integrated into the campaign for the legalization of abortion in Portugal, feature women the day after an illegal abortion. In Possession (2004), another large series of cakes that are rarely displayed, Rego's direct experience with depression and therapy adds inspiration to prepared photographs of alleged hysteria sufferers in the 19th century.

The Museu Picasso Málaga is once again committed to highlighting the work of women artists of the 20th century, following previous exhibitions dedicated to Sophie Taeuber-Arp (2009), Hilma af Klint (2013), Louise Bourgeois (2015) and the surrealist artists (2017).

The exhibition, organized by Tate Britain in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Den Haag and the Picasso Museum Málaga, is curated by Elena Crippa, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Tate Britain, along with Zuzana Flašková, assistant curator. from the Tate. In 2017, Elena Crippa curated Bacon, Freud and the London School in the Malaga art gallery. For the occasion, a complete illustrated catalog has been published in Spanish and English.