The Museo de Arte ContemporĂĄneo de Monterrey presents the first retrospective in America of the Portuguese artist Paula Rego, acknowledged as one of the leading figurative painters in contemporary art. Her unusual intensity with which she constructs a visual narrative of the human condition is an interweaving of experience, wishes and fantasies with childhood memories of her native country, as well as artwork, literature and music. Born in Lisborn in 1935, Rego has lived in London for the better part of her life. After experimenting with surrealism early on, she has avoided the dominant currents in art and has encountered in literature a vehicle for poking fun at the essence of a person and society that represents the human drama with such strength that it overpowers the spectator arousing their curiosity. For Marco Livingston, curator of the show, Paula Rego has produced, consistently, a body of work that speaks to powerfully and directly to everyone with a sense of compassion and social
justice. Frequently, with political repercussions, energized by a vivid imagination and a love for the grotesque, the work of Rego provokes a tenacious challenge within the spectator to reconsider those life experiences that affect us all. The exhibition is organized chronologically beginning with the early works from the artist’s career beginning in the 1950s when she was an art student. It moves on to her period in the late 1950s when she discovered surrealism and then had a liberating encounter with the faux-naïve style of the French painter Jean Dubuffet that, in a way, allowed her work to be more fluid and freer. After the death of her father in 1966 and learning that her husband, the painter Victor Willing, had multiple sclerosis, Paula Rego sougth a more whimsical, illustrative style of painting. Shortly after the death of her husband in 1988, Rego started to make prints, and knew that she had found the instinctual medium for drawing and narration within her. In 1994, she embarked on a new series, utilizing a new medium, pastel. During the last decade, the artist has submerged herself even more into her own personal history and she began to make beings and scenes with real materials to later draw them. HALLS: 6 to 11 / First Floor. ON VIEW: October 2010 - February 2011.
Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s “Fantasia”, 1995 / pastel on paper on aluminium / triptych, centre panel (detail) / 150 x 450 cm overall / Marlborough International Fine Art | The Pillowman, 2004 / pastel on paper mounted on aluminium / triptych, centre panel (detail) / 180 x 360 cm overall / Collection of the Artist, Under Commodate to Fundação Paula Rego/Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais | Human Cargo, 2007-2008 / conte pencil, conte and ink wash on paper / triptych, centre panel (detail) / centre panel: 163 x 163 cm / Courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art, London.
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