“Story Line” exposes Paula Rego’s ambiguous narratives in London

The exhibition, on display at Victoria Miro, in London, shows the most intimate and revealing side of Paula Rego’s work. Ambiguous female figures, unsettling domestic scenes and lines full of tension expose the Portuguese artist’s major themes: power, violence, intimacy and the female condition.

At first glance, these works look like sketches – the kind that artists make on their way to something more finished. But this expectation is not entirely confirmed.

The drawings impose themselves: restless, unfinished and, often, more direct than the paintings they would later give rise to. This is the proposal of , the most recent exhibition of Paula Rego at the Victoria Miro gallery, in London.

Paula Rego was born in Lisbon in 1935, grew up under the Estado Novo dictatorship and then moved to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. Spent most of his life in the United Kingdomwhere he became a central figure in British art, without ever ceasing to draw a deep part of his inspiration from Portuguese culture and politics.

Em 2010, received the title of “lady”a clear sign of the influence that his work had achieved in Great Britain, says Alexandra Lourenço Diasprofessor of Lusophone Studies at King’s College London, in an article in .

It is through the work he produced throughout his life that the title of the exhibition begins to gain its full meaning. Story Line may sound like a descriptive designation, but It’s more than that: it’s a method. He tells visitors how Rego worked and how we should look at his work.

Paula Rego is often seen as a story artistusing drawing as a means of expression. But the exhibition, and the book with the same title that accompanies it, written by his son Nick Willing, leads us to read these words with greater attention.

The “story” is something that happens down the line. In an interview with , in 2011, Rego stated: “when you write the story… the invention comes when you make a drawing”. In your case, the story emerges through drawinginstead of preceding it.

This is the central idea of ​​the exhibition at Victoria Miro: bringing together what is presented as the most complete set of Rego drawings shown to this day, the exhibition reveals, first and foremost, its identity as “drawrer”, the word she herself used — someone who thinks with their hands.

As Willing writes in the book that accompanies the exhibition: “Paula’s work can stand on its own, without words or contextbecause each image is, in itself, a very strong image. We can let its mysteries envelop us.”