Art review: Family Sayings by Paula Rego

Why is Paula Rego not internationally renowned? These are the last days of the amazing Barcelona exhibition devoted to her work, which will finish on October 8th, and you should rush to see it before it’s too late.

Lisbon-born Rego was part of the London Group with David Hockney and Frank Auerbach, and she has lived in the UK since the Fifties, becoming a Dame of the British Empire in 2010. Now an octogenarian, she doesn’t seem to have slowed down one whit, as her paintings and engravings from recent years bear witness.

Rego’s predominant theme is women, and in particular the depiction of women in a controlling, misogynistic society. Her women are not beautiful nor elegantly dressed, but they are strong, feisty survivors, in spite of the pain that they endure. The tone of the show moves quickly from quirkily eccentric (e.g. The Fitting, which would be a traditional scene in a tailor’s shop were it not for the Balthus-like little girl splayed across an armchair in the background) to deeply disturbing (the Abortion series) during the course of a few short galleries.

Her book illustrations make characters from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre look more like the Addams Family. Some of her ‘women’ have five o’clock shadows and appear to be transvestites. Ambiguity abounds, with self-portraits of the artist at work wearing the head of a wild animal. In Rego’s interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf is a sleazy villain whose crime is eventually avenged by the high-heeled mother of Red Riding Hood, who pierces his belly with a pitchfork and then wears his pelt around her neck in triumph.

There are many direct influences on Rego’s work, such as the Caprichos etchings of Goya and the social satire of Hogarth. Some of her series are visual interpretations of plays (by Malcolm McDonagh) or musical compositions (Benjamin Britten’s ‘The Children’s Crusade’). The exhibition’s title itself is the name of a book by Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg. Still, I found myself wishing that the wall text was a little less heavy-handed. Filled with comparisons to (almost exclusively male) artists of the past, the explanations by the curator direct the viewer away from the immediate, intense experience of viewing Rego’s paintings and drawings with fresh eyes, by putting them into a male-centric context. There is some unintentional irony here.

The intensity of Rego’s work cannot fail to affect the viewer. The drawings in the Misericordia series, inspired by the writings of 19th-century Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, show patients being mistreated in what appears to be a nursing home or insane asylum. Nothing, however, prepared me for the Abortion series, where miserable women in stirrups are victimised, first by their situation and then by the system that claims to help them. (These observations about Rego’s depiction of painful subjects are praise, by the way, not warnings!)

The Barcelona venue, usually devoted to photography exhibitions, is a curious choice for this show. It’s a pity that Rego’s exhibition is in the hidden-away upper floor galleries of the Palau de la Virreina instead of, for instance, CaixaForum, where many more visitors could discover her work.

Until October 8th. More information here.