Paula Rego
(Lisbon 1935 – 2022 London)
Split, 2017, pastel on paper on aluminum, 102 x 67 cm, framed
Provenance:
Marlborough Fine Art ltd., London
Victoria Miro, London (acquired from the above in 2022)
Exhibited:
Victoria Miro, Frieze London, 12.-16. Oktober 2022
Paula Rego is among the most important painters of her generation. Born in Lisbon, she came to London in the early 1950s, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and exhibited with the London Group alongside David Hockney and Frank Auerbach. As the first Associate Artist of the National Gallery, through the major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2021 and her participation in the Venice Biennale in 2022, she achieved late but all the more lasting international recognition. Drawing on fairy tales, literature and Portuguese folk culture, her work speaks fearlessly of power, violence and desire, and of the hidden inner lives of women and girls.
Split is one of the artist's last large-scale pastels. Its starting point is a pair of papier-mâché dolls that Rego hung in her London studio and staged as models – inspired by the Comtesse de Ségur's Les Malheurs de Sophie, in which little Sophie destroys her wax doll. Dressed in identical red sailor dresses, the figures float like marionettes: one with blonde hair and alert blue eyes, the other with empty sockets and a bleeding mouth, her legs in ballet shoes dangling helplessly. Below right, a stocky boy with a lowered sabre gazes up at them defiantly – perpetrator, witness, or himself a mere puppet?
With a few masterful strokes, Rego distils her great themes: the divided self, the cruelty of children's play, the ambivalence between innocence and violence. Vivid red, the delicate pink of the ground and deliberately unworked passages lend the sheet an immediacy found only in late work. A compelling, museum-quality work from the final period of an artist whose market standing has grown steadily since her death.
Specialist: Joëlle Romba
(Lisbon 1935 – 2022 London)
Split, 2017, pastel on paper on aluminum, 102 x 67 cm, framed
Provenance:
Marlborough Fine Art ltd., London
Victoria Miro, London (acquired from the above in 2022)
Exhibited:
Victoria Miro, Frieze London, 12.-16. Oktober 2022
Paula Rego is among the most important painters of her generation. Born in Lisbon, she came to London in the early 1950s, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and exhibited with the London Group alongside David Hockney and Frank Auerbach. As the first Associate Artist of the National Gallery, through the major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2021 and her participation in the Venice Biennale in 2022, she achieved late but all the more lasting international recognition. Drawing on fairy tales, literature and Portuguese folk culture, her work speaks fearlessly of power, violence and desire, and of the hidden inner lives of women and girls.
Split is one of the artist's last large-scale pastels. Its starting point is a pair of papier-mâché dolls that Rego hung in her London studio and staged as models – inspired by the Comtesse de Ségur's Les Malheurs de Sophie, in which little Sophie destroys her wax doll. Dressed in identical red sailor dresses, the figures float like marionettes: one with blonde hair and alert blue eyes, the other with empty sockets and a bleeding mouth, her legs in ballet shoes dangling helplessly. Below right, a stocky boy with a lowered sabre gazes up at them defiantly – perpetrator, witness, or himself a mere puppet?
With a few masterful strokes, Rego distils her great themes: the divided self, the cruelty of children's play, the ambivalence between innocence and violence. Vivid red, the delicate pink of the ground and deliberately unworked passages lend the sheet an immediacy found only in late work. A compelling, museum-quality work from the final period of an artist whose market standing has grown steadily since her death.
Specialist: Joëlle Romba
