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PAULA REGO: OBEDIENCE AND DEFIANCE Powerful response to tyranny from iconic Portuguese painter
The sense of feminist anger which rips through this lifetime-spanning retrospective by the London-based Portuguese artist Paula Rego is palpable. In her 1990s Dog Women series, painted images of women in unusual poses – lying on the fl oor asleep atop a man’s suit jacket; hunched on all fours to escape stoning; pregnant and somehow constrained within an armchair – occupy an uncanny space between the celebratory and the unpleasant. In her collection of etchings on female genital mutilation from 2009, the weirdly maternal fi gure of each cutter looms amid the monochrome of Victorian fairytale illustrations. Meanwhile, in the series of works about abortion, women are shown in defi ance before and after the act of undergoing an illegal procedure, Rego offering a stark and uncompromising response to the failure of Portugal’s 1998 referendum on abortion to result in legalisation.
The political is never far from Rego’s work: the disturbing ‘War’ (2003), for example, features anthropomorphic beings, one childlike, bloodied and being carried by a mother, in a hallucinatory response to the carnage of the second Iraq War. And her 1960s paintings are more abstract and Pop Art-infl uenced in their response to Portugal’s then-prevalent Salazar dictatorship and her liberal father’s stifl ed outrage. The cartoonish ‘Red Monkey Offers Bear a Poisoned Dove’ and ‘Wife Cuts Off Red Monkey’s Tail’ (both 1981) are visceral and confrontational, providing references to her male relationships, particularly with her husband, the painter Victor Willing. Some pieces bear the quality of a fairytale illustration, others a stark realism, yet all cumulatively add up to a powerful response to the last half-century from a fi ercely feminist perspective. (David Pollock) ■ Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh, until Sun 19 Apr ●●●●●
1 Feb–31 Mar 2020 THE LIST 99
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