Paula Rego
Coinciding with the public opening of the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, and within the context of the permanent exhibition of the collection, this temporary exhibition will be dedicated exclusively to Paula Rego and will include some unique features. An exhibition which is fully justified by the importance of the paintings on display, its aim is quite clear: to give as full an idea as possible of the artist's highly prolific career.

The paintings on display were produced over two crucially important decades, between 1987 and 2008, and currently belong to the Marlborough Gallery. They are mostly large-scale paintings, and complement and reinforce the discursive possibilities of the collection, making it possible to observe some essential artistic aspects of Paula Rego's career. Together they illustrate how Paula Rego has appropriated and interpreted a host of different narrative and visual sources - ranging from literature to cinema, from her own experience and factual events to her fantastic imagination - and the processes through which she has constructed her own unique creative universe.
At the end of the 1980s, her experiments with the narrative possibilities of realism resulted in such remarkable examples as The Policeman's Daughter, The Maids and The Family. Included in the same area are the markedly authorial resources that she used in the 1990s to capture the huge expressiveness density of her isolated figures, as shown by the extraordinary painting Dog Woman. This is her first work in pastels and has been chosen as the illustration for the cover of the exhibition catalogue. And equally clearly demonstrated within the context of this exhibition is The importance that drawing has had in the course of Paula Rego's artistic development is clearly demonstrated in this exhibition, both as a technique in itself and in relation to her painting, a perspective wich has been highlighted by her most recent retrospective exhibitions. The presence of some preparatory sketches in the collection of the Casa das Histórias, loaned by the artist herself, as well as some representative examples of her most recent work, such as the triptych Human Cargo, enable us to establish some important dialogue.