Paula Rego did not ask herself whether art can have a political effect. When a referendum in Portugal to legalize abortion failed at the end of the 1990s due to the low turnout, she began to paint pictures of women in various stages of pain who, out of necessity, had had an illegal abortion. She herself had walked the angel maker’s path several times while studying in London in the 1950s, and the confrontational portraits of suffering women she produced from this experience were used as material for a second campaign. Many observers attributed the fact that this was successful in 2007 to the empathetic visualizations of Portugal’s most famous painter, who are now extensively assembled in a hall of the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover.
The pastel paintings and engravings show blood-smeared women with spread legs, puking, lying on an improvised gynecological chair made of director’s chairs or lying on the bed as if slain, with the subsequent washing on a zinc bucket or curled up between sheets. The artist, who is otherwise at home in the fantastic, drew her inspiration for this harrowing series from the realistic horror that characterized Goya in his series on war. They are willful self-exposures of a radical nature that transcends borders.
“I was always shy, but I could do anything in my paintings.”
“I think shame is one of the most interesting experiences we have,” Rego is quoted as saying in the exhibition, the first major retrospective of the painter in Germany, who died in June at the age of 87. However, shame only becomes a mysterious artistic experience when its spontaneous paralyzing powers are overcome. Shame initially makes people mute. Also Paula Rego. “I was always shy,” the then 82-year-old confessed in a 2017 documentary, “but I could do anything in my pictures.” She used her depression as an occasion for dark allegories, painted masochistic fantasies and Catholic punishments, and she composed excessively violent scenes in a way that men tend to do.
Paula Rego’s courage to break a taboo in order to portray the suppressed harshness of female ideas in a world in which “the woman is the underdog”, but only very rarely expresses itself in the abruptly drastic. Her artistic world is more the symbolic realm between pleasure and nightmare. Here, deformed spirits interact with various versions of the artist, military and religious dignitaries from the fascist Portugal of their youth populate a world of self-confident femininity as tamed creatures with potato heads, and animals with human characteristics love young girls or rape women in armchairs.
A world of chimeras made up of animal and human parts gathers in two halls
The protagonists of this bizarre world of control, conflict and flight are also represented in the impressive exhibition, which is very convincingly curated by Adam Budak and Alistair Hicks. From Rego’s London studio, Lila Nunes, her long-time collaborator, who also serves as the model for numerous paintings representing the artist’s alter ego, brought the bestiary of papier-mâché figures that Rego created for her pictorial dreams. Under the title “Theatrum Mundi”, a multifaceted world of chimeras made up of animal and human parts is gathered in two halls, which can be found everywhere in the main exhibition. However, Paula Rego’s life theme “Fear” is also an expression of her black humor in this fundus of a horror fairy tale, because none of these monsters is really evil or threatening.
Paula Rego: “Angel” (1998).
(Photo: Ostrich Arts Ltd and Victoria Miro)
Rego, who became a celebrated star at this year’s Venice Art Biennale with images of family transgressions, and to whom a boldly towered individual museum made of pink concrete by Eduardo Souto de Moura in Cascais, Portugal is dedicated, has made many changes of style in her 70-year career, which are not included in this exhibition. The courageous Dadaist-political collages from the time of the Salazar dictatorship or their impressive half-figure works, which mixed surrealistic themes with the wild compositional technique of Abstract Expressionism, were omitted from the selection of over 80 works.
The concentration on the creative phase of the last three decades, when Rego developed her border crossings between realism and mixed world into an unmistakable narrative style, especially with pastel chalks and graphics, gives the presentation of her work a homogenizing bracket. In this context, the show in Hanover shows the exhaustive overview of an alchemical work from experiences of power and pleasure, which is one of the most important world theaters of figurative art.
Paula Rego: There and Back Again. Kestner Society, Hanover. Until January 29th.