Paula Rego: An Enduring Journey focuses on Rego’s printmaking oeuvre, bringing together almost fifty years of graphic works, which explore the themes of power, rebellion, sexuality and gender, grief and poverty.
Join us for a talk and tour of the exhibition on Saturday January 7 at 2pm, where we will be joined by a representative from the Cristea Roberts Gallery.
January 7 – February 20, 2023
We are delighted to be hosting an exhibition from the late Dame Paula Rego RA, one of the most important figurative artists of her generation, who placed women’s lives and stories at the centre of her work. Paula Rego: An Enduring Journey focuses on Rego’s printmaking oeuvre, and will include highlights from her almost fifty years of graphic works, which explore the themes of power, rebellion, sexuality and gender, grief and poverty. On display will be thirty-two prints, which come directly from the artist’s estate, and will be shown together with a group of the newly editioned prints from plates drawn before and set aside until now.
Over the course of her career, Rego produced a profound and ground-breaking body of prints. The work not only possesses the extraordinary imaginative power of her paintings, but reflects the innovative possibilities of the medium through her experimentation with etching, lithography and aquatint, often employing hand-colouring in the process.
Rego made her first prints, experimenting with etching, in the 1950s at the Slade School of Art, London. In the 1980s she began to focus more closely on the medium when she made one of her most coveted series, The Nursery Rhymes, 1989, which immedi¬ately established her as one of the foremost graphic artists of her generation. Made up of over 30 etchings, several of these will be on show, including Hey diddle diddle; Ride a Cock-horse; The Old Woman who lived in a Shoe and Little Miss Muffet I, 1989. Working in the medium of print to mostly produce series of works, other familiar childhood tales and stories that appear in the exhibition include Peter Pan (Flying Children, 1992) and Jane Eyre (Jane Eyre, 2001 – 2002).
Rego offered up a subversive reinterpretation of these popular English nursery rhymes, folk tales, poems and novels. Familiar and seemingly innocent verses are reimagined as images about cruelty, power, sexual curiosity and desire and the haunting and disconcerting aspects of childhood. Rego also took inspiration from her own memories of personal events, from her childhood to her experiences as a woman, including female suffering and fortitude.
Visitors to the exhibition will see new prints, which have been editioned from plates Rego drew over thirty years ago. The nature of printmaking and the opportunity to work on several plates at once mean images flowed thick and fast from Rego’s mind and over the years plates had been set aside in her studio.
Through her use of printmaking Rego has made some of the most important and complex graphic works of the past fifty years. The medium had enabled her ideas and stories to reach wide audiences.
Cristea Roberts Gallery is the worldwide representative for original prints by Paula Rego. The exhibition is on display at the Burton until February 20 2023.
Image: Paula Rego b. 1935 – 2022, The Neverland, 1992. © Ostrich Arts Ltd. Courtesy Ostrich Arts Ltd and Cristea Roberts Gallery
