Paula Rego

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism

Paula Rego Details

From Publishers Weekly Born in Portugal in 1935, her girlhood spent under the dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, London-based painter Paula Rego fiercely expressed her revulsion at a repressive patriarchal regime in Salazar Vomiting the Homeland. Her continually evolving style echoes Arshile Gorky's free-floating forms, Jean Dubuffet's naive spontaneity and Miro's pendulous sexual imagery, yet she turns her varied sources to her own ends. Fairy tales and Jungian archetypes pervade the childlike yet menacing Two Men Separated by a River of Blood. As British art critic McEwen notes in this lavishly illustrated monograph, many women see themselves and their predicaments in Rego's art--for example, in The Bride's Secret Diary , which gives palpable form to the emotional subtext of a marriage, or in the vibrant, delightful Opera and Red Monkey series, which caricature people in the form of animals. Rego's latest paintings speak of maternal loss and hope, of wisdom won with age, of private dreams projected onto an uncaring external world. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From Library Journal This is the first monograph to treat the complete works of important figurative painter Paula Rego. Through a strong combination of respect for tradition and an intensely female viewpoint, Rego created a body of work that is disarming in its seeming simplicity while containing private, secret worlds. The female form, drawn frequently from images of Rego's childhood in Portugal, appears in a variety of aspects--e.g., realistic, distorted, convoluted--but always as the artist's expression of her own experiences as a woman. The bold, bright exhilaration of depicting the secret world of feminine imagination and dreams dominates the works, and viewers are invited to share the novel experience of entering into this world. McEwen has written a thoughtful commentary on the personal, psychological, and creative life of a provocative contemporary woman artist.- Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New YorkCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more

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