July 2021 Newsletter: Paula Rego

Paula Rego paintings show through her paintings' bold strokes and extraordinary imaginative storytelling the oppression and suffering of women in personal life and in socio-political context. Paula Rego's exhibition in Tate Britain consists of 100 works, including collage, oil paintings on camvas stuck on aluminium large-scale pastels, ink and pencil drawings, and etchings. It is Paula Rego's full range of work from her early 1950s work where she explored through art her personal as well as social struggle, leading to her series of large pastel artworks where for each theme of these series she paints in bold ways with reference to different women's issues such as: Love, Abortion, Exploitation, Possession, Hysteria, Subordination, Female Genial Mutilation up to her 2000s richly layered, staged scenes, even plainly speaking about the role of women themselves to the continuation of the women's sufferings and situation. 

My personal opinion is that Paula's Rego art is a breakage on the mirror about norms of women's representation, a mockery of stereotypes, power, leaders and women's themselves in times. It gives the visitor a feeling of suffocation and need of breath but it is a good punch to the stomach to bring realities alive and make one realise that inequalities exist and more fights are to be won in favour of women's and oppressed others. 

Paula Rego is a Portuguese Anglophile born 1935 who studied Art in the UK.
17.7.2021

Article and Photos Mary Zagoritou