Exhibitions Huon Mallalieu

Paula Rego’s The Dance, 1988

EXHIBITIONS HUON MALLALIEU PAULA REGO Tate Britain, 7th July to 24th October

At 86, painter and printmaker Paula Rego is one of the most important figurative artists working today.

Extraordinarily, she was elected RA only in 2016, although already a DBE (2010) and Grand Cross of the Order of St James of the Sword (2004) in her native Portugal. Since 2000, there has been a Paula Rego museum in Cascais, fittingly titled the Casa das Histórias, the House of Stories.

In the 1960s, she went through a period of surrealism, influenced by Miro, and for a while her style verged on the abstract. This was a reaction against the formal drawing style she had been taught as a student at the Slade.

But in 1990 she was appointed the first associate artist, effectively artist in residence, at the National Gallery, and that close encounter with Old Masters turned her back towards her origins in formal draughtsmanship.

Above all, she is a teller of tales. Some are political, campaigning against Salazar’s dictatorship or for women’s rights. Others give visual expression to stories she heard as a child from her grandmother. She blends the real and the imaginative, suggesting, rather than stating, what might be going on.

There is a kinship with Goya. He, along with many novelists, would echo her words ‘Pictures tell stories, but not sometimes in a very straightforward way, and you might start with one story and finish up with a very different one. You have to trust the picture, because it’s the picture that you’re doing that is telling you what is inside you, and what you really feel sometimes ain’t very nice. And then you discover at the end who you are.’

This retrospective includes over 100 paintings, drawings, pastels, prints and collages, covering 60 years.

Now highly esteemed, with London and Cape Town shows to celebrate his 80th birthday, Hylton Nel was not always so. When he was 28, a South African radio reporter’s reaction to his ceramics was ‘What is the point of this, anyway?’ Anyone seeing his loopy, Wemyss-like cats today could tell her. The exhibition at the Fine Art Society in London continues to 30th July.

Seaside Modern at Hastings Contemporary (né Jerwood) until 31st October is a timely look at staycations in the first half of the 20th century through the eyes of major Modern British artists. The Romance of Ruins at Sir John Soane’s Museum to 5th September is an equally timely reminder of 18th-century Britain’s discovery of Greece through those of the watercolourist William Pars.