Victoria Miro is delighted to participate in Art Basel OVR:20c, which is dedicated to work made between 1900 and 1999. This is the gallery’s first solo presentation by Paula Rego since announcing its representation of the artist and features rare ink and watercolour works on paper from the early 1990s.
An artist of uncompromising vision and a peerless storyteller, Paula Rego has since the 1950s brought immense psychological insight and imaginative power to the genre of figurative art. Drawing upon details of her own extraordinary life, on politics and art history, on literature, folk legends, myths and fairytales, Rego’s work at its heart is an exploration of human relationships, her piercing eye trained on the established order and the codes, structures and dynamics of power that embolden or repress the characters she depicts.
The 1990s were an especially significant period for Rego. At the very beginning of the decade she was appointed the first National Gallery Associate Artist (1989–1990); important solo exhibitions of her work were held at Fundação das Descobertas, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Portugal (1997) and Tate Liverpool, UK (1996–1997); and she was included in seminal group exhibitions such as Unbound: Possibilities in Painting, curated by Adrian Searle and Greg Hilty, held at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1994. The first of two The Southbank Show documentaries about the artist was broadcast in 1992, further raising her profile beyond the art world.
The works on view in this presentation see Rego continuing to explore themes from earlier in her career as well as mining new territory. The artist identifies 1993 as the year in which her work made a substantive change, borne out in major works such as The First Mass in Brazil and The Artist in Her Studio, both of which were included in the Hayward exhibition, the latter suggesting a challenge to the traditional representation of the (usually male) artist. Two studies for The Artist in Her Studio are included here, along with Study for Caritas, 1993, which relates to another key work from the period, in addition to works relating to folk and fairy tales including Study for Peter Pan and other stories, 1992, and the entrancing Study for The White Cat, 1994, in which Rego brings her unique powers as a storyteller to a tale by a seventeenthcentury writer whom she regards as ‘the greatest storyteller of her time’. While many of these works are titled ‘study’, they are intricately conceived and richly executed works in their own right, integral to Rego’s creative journey and the development of her ideas.
Born in 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal, Dame Paula Rego RA studied at The Slade School of Fine Art from 1952 to 1956. She lives and works in London. Current major solo exhibitions include Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance, curated by Catherine Lampert, which travelled from MK Gallery, Milton Keynes to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh in 2019–2020 and opened at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin in September 2020 (18 September 2020–3 January 2021). Paula Rego – The Scream of Imagination | In Keys, organised by the Serralves Foundation, is currently on view at MACNA – Museu de Arte Contemporânea Nadir Afonso, Chaves, Portugal, until 18 October 2020.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Giving Fear a Face, CEART: Centro de Arte Tomás y Valiente, Madrid, Spain (2019); The Cruel Stories of Paula Rego, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, France (2018–2019) and Folktales and Fairy Tales, Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais, Portugal (2018). Exhibitions of her work have been held previously at venues including: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Gas Natural Fenosa, La Coruña, Spain (2014); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey, Mexico; Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil (2010-2011); École supérieure des beaux-arts, Nîmes, France (2008); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C., USA (2007–2008); Fundação das Descobertas, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Portugal (1997) Tate Liverpool, UK (1996–1997); AIR Gallery, London, UK (1981). Recent international group exhibitions include All Too Human: Bacon Freud and a Century of Painting, Tate Britain, London, UK (2018); travelled to Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Hungary; Post-Pop, Outside the Commonplace, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal (2018); Macau Biennial, Macau Museum of Art, Macau, China (2018); Bacon, Freud and the School of London, Museo Picasso, Malaga, Spain; travelled to ARoS, Aarhus, Denmark (2017–2018). Her work is in the collections of numerous museums including the British Museum, Tate, National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery, London, UK; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, USA; The Art Institute of Chicago, USA and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA.
In 2010, she was made a Dame of the British Empire for services to the Arts in the Queen’s Birthday Honours and was awarded the prestigious Grã-Cruz da Ordem de Sant’Iago da Espada from the President of Portugal in 2004. Rego has received several Honorary Doctorates from universities including the University of St. Andrews (1999), University of East Anglia (1999), Rhode Island School of Design (2000), The London Institute (2002), Oxford University (2005), Roehampton University (2005), Faculdade de Belas-Artes at the University of Lisbon (2011), and the University of Cambridge (2015).
She is the recipient of many awards such as the Honors Medal of the city of Lisbon, Portugal (2016), the Maria Isabel Barreno prize (2017), Portuguese Government’s Medal of Cultural Merit (2019) and the Lifetime Achievement Award from Harper’s Bazaar (2019). Paula Rego will have her first solo exhibition at Victoria Miro during the latter part of 2021