Paula Rego exhibits for the first time in Vila Nova de Gaia
Vila Nova de Gaia will host for the first time an exhibition of the Portuguese artist Paula Rego, a show of 60 works that will be inaugurated on Saturday and ends on April 30th, the city council announced today.
The partnership between Vila Nova de Gaia and Paula Rego House of Stories, the D. Luís I Foundation and the Cascais Town Hall leads the House-Museum Teixeira Lopes two periods in the artistic career of the painter, the 1980s and 1990s, a chapter dedicated to the infantile character Peter Pan.
“This series captures an entire childhood imaginary, recreating a fantasy world, retelling the fantastic story of Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up. On the other hand, he puts us face to face with the vivacity and the solidity of the artist’s imaginary world, where stories heard during childhood function as realist structures that integrate aspects of society and its archetypes, “said curator Catarina Alfaro, coordinator of Casa das Histórias.
The Mayor of Vila Nova de Gaia, Eduardo Vítor Rodrigues, believes that this exhibition will “reinforce the image of the city as a cultural pole of reference and ‘city of arts’“, adding that the city has “sought to strengthen relations between artists, to bring great names of the national and international artistic panorama “.
In addition to this exhibition, Paula Rego has also scheduled another three shows in the UK by 2020, as well as two in Madrid and Dublin, as well as at Casa de Serralves in September this year.
According to Catarina Alfaro, a researcher on the work of Paula Rego, exhibitions are planned at the Jerwood Gallery (May 13 to October 22 this year), at the Milton MK Gallery (June), at the Scottish National Gallery (November 23 to March 26). April 2020) in the United Kingdom, and in the Irish Museum of Modern Art (May 25, 2020, to November 1, 2020) in Ireland.
In addition to Serralves, another exhibition is also planned by the artist in Madrid, at CEART – Centro de Arte Tomás y Valiente.
And for the Casa das Histórias, in Cascais – this year completes a decade of existence -, between July and November of this year will be presented the exhibition ‘Paula Rego: Obra Gráfica’, curated by Catarina Alfaro.
The coordinator of the museum dedicated to the work of the painter told Lusa, at the time of the announcement of these shows, that 2019 and 2020 “will be very important years in the artist’s exhibition in the UK“, where he lives.
“Paula Rego continues to work in her atelier and is developing work in different formats of painting and drawing. It will be a beautiful surprise,” he revealed, about the Portuguese artist based in the United Kingdom.
Last year Paula Rego presented her first major solo exhibition in Paris at the Orangerie Museum, which welcomed more than 183,000 people.
Born in Lisbon in 1935, she left Portugal as a teenager during the Salazar dictatorship to study at the Slade School of Art in London, where she lived and lived for more than 50 years.
The only female artist in the London School group, Paula Rego was distinguished by a highly figurative and literary work, considered incisive and singular by art criticism.
At that time, Paula Rego coexisted with prominent names of the painting as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and David Hockney.
It was at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she attended the painting course between 1952 and 1956, which met her husband, the British artist Victor Willing (1928-1988).
Paula Rego was honoured in 2010 by Queen Elizabeth II, with the rank of Officer of the Order of the British Empire, for her contribution to the arts.
In 2016 he was awarded the Municipal Medal of Honor of the City of Lisbon.
