House of Stories Paula Rego marks 50 years

The new exhibition at Casa das Histórias Paula Rego evokes the artist's first solo exhibition, presented in 1965 at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes, to recall, on the 50th anniversary of the 25th of April, the themes and remarkable events in the recent history of Portugal that Paula Rego, fearlessly, he explored in his works.

“Paula Rego: Manifesto” is curated by Catarina Alfaro and Leonor de Oliveira and will be on display at Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, in Cascais, from April 18th to October 6th 2024. The exhibition is held as part of an initiative by the D. Luís I Foundation and Cascais Municipal Council, within the scope of the Museus District programme, which thus pursues the ambitious cultural policy that together defined.

“Paula Rego: Manifesto” is part of the recreation of the very first solo exhibition of Paula Rego, presented almost 60 years ago, at a time marked by the intensification of the repressive and persecutory environment of the dictatorship. From April 18th, eighteen of the nineteen paintings that made up that historic exhibition, created between 1961 and 1965, will be reunited again and can be seen at Casa das Histórias Paula Rego.

Some of the works included in “Paula Rego: Manifesto” were located only recently, after years of uncertain whereabouts, the result of meticulous research work, still ongoing, which aims to catalog all the known works that Paula Rego produced between the 1950s and 1960s. The works on loan come from the collections of national institutions such as the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Serralves Foundation, as well as private Portuguese, English and French collections.

In works such as “Manifesto for a Lost Cause” (1965), “Hungry Dogs” (1963), “British Allegory” (1962-63), “Summer Afternoon” (1961) and “February 1907 (The Regicide)” ( 1965), Paula Rego, courageously, asserted an attitude of resistance against the dictatorship, which he considered anachronistic and absurd. The paintings exhibited in 1965 and again in 2024, communicated her experience as an artist and woman and revealed the violence of her lived reality, which included the Portuguese Colonial War, which the artist also criticized. To highlight the importance of that exhibition in the Portuguese cultural panorama of the time, “Paula Rego: Manifesto” includes documents from that period related to the organization and critical reception of the 1965 exhibition.

The paintings on display also reveal how plastic experimentalism confused censorship and called into question the artistic, political and social conventions of the time. The curators of the 2024 exhibition, Catarina Alfaro and Leonor de Oliveira, note that “the plurimaterial technique that the artist then developed, using heterogeneous materials — paints, paper cut and pasted onto the canvas — and the themes addressed, which suggest a critical position and defiance of authority, they manifest an attitude of political resistance through creative practice. His first solo exhibition therefore created, in that dark year of 1965, a space for dissent, confrontation and freedom.”

However, the recreation of the original exhibition occupies only 1 of the 8 rooms of Casa das Histórias Paula Rego dedicated to the exhibition that will open on April 18th. The second part of the exhibition presents around 60 works and proposes a critical in-depth analysis, through the perspective and experience of Paula Rego, on themes such as the post-revolutionary context, as well as the artist's civic intervention in her country of origin. The curators also highlight: “for the first time, a set of works is brought together that comment on the Revolution of April 25, 1974 and the persistence of iconic elements of the dictatorship in democratic Portuguese society”.

The second part of the exhibition also presents the works in which Paula Rego addresses issues relating to women's rights, a subject he has dealt with throughout his career, from his first provocations about female pleasure, the constant denunciation of repression, violence and discrimination against women, to the most recent series, such as “Mutilação female genital organs” from 2009. Of particular note are the drawings in which he confronts the indifference of the Portuguese, translated into the large abstention in the referendum of June 1998, on the issue of decriminalizing abortion. With these works, the artist intervened more directly in the political discussion in Portugal and “contributed decisively to raising public awareness about the need to take a stance, which would happen in the third referendum held in 2007 and which ultimately changed Portuguese legislation” , recall the curators.

For Catarina Alfaro and Leonor de Oliveira, Paula Rego was a counter-historian artist: “the narrative about the dictatorship and the democratization process has been dominated by the male perspective and actions. In contrast, the work of Paula Rego Incorporates into the critical approach to these historical moments not only the female experience, but also the role of women in the fight for democracy and their rights. The artist’s creative work and civic intervention also remind us that democracy is a project under construction and must be constantly reviewed and promoted.”

SOURCE: PR Casa das Histórias Paula Rego