22 May - 23 November 2014
Opening at 6:pm.
Curators: Catarina Alfaro, Leonor de
Oliveira
Since 2009, the Casa das Histórias has made its presence
felt as a monographic museum devoted to the artist Paula Rego and
today, it is the museological facility that holds the most
representative collection of the artist's production and engages in
studying and disseminating her work and her closest artistic links.
The exhibition 1961: Order and Chaos gathers together a
broad collection of Paula Rego's work produced during the 1960s and
1970s[1] in an effort to document and analyse
the beginning of her artistic path and the impact it made on the
Portuguese panorama of the time.
The work conceived by Paula Rego during these years calls up the
country's political situation, where she commented upon it
sarcastically and brutally. Upon stressing this thematic direction,
the political unease running through the artist's work became
further entrenched particularly during this period but also during
later stages in her production.
Apart from Paula Rego's work, the work of other Portuguese artists
is also shown; they too adopted a critical stance in relation to
the country's political situation and its social and cultural life,
while the same time they developed their own figurative language:
they are the artists Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos and Eduardo Batarda.
The connection is therefore explored between diverse, innovating
kinds of research into the figurative field as from the 1960s
together with political, social and cultural commentary.
Furthermore, the exhibition includes Victor Willing's work (taken
from the Casa das Histórias collection) which reveals the artistic,
intimate complicity that he established with Paula Rego. Considered
at the Slade School of Art to be a "spokesman for his generation"
owing to his intellectual brilliance, right from the start of Paula
Rego's academic training, Willing became her guiding reference, her
most immediate link to the artistic milieu of the time.
Apart from displaying the paintings, engravings and drawings,
there is also a part of the exhibition which comprises documentary
evidence thereby recalling in a most forceful way, the most
important milestones in Paula Rego's artistic career in Portugal:
her first public exhibition in our country (1961), a study grant
she received from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (1962-1963)
and her first solo exhibition held at the National Society of Fine
Arts in Lisbon (1965). The initiatives held by the Calouste
Gulbenkian Foundation exerted a clear impact on Paula Rego's career
and they are also reflected in the large number of her works the
organisation has acquired since 1965. The Foundation has therefore
been awarded a distinguished place in this retrospective owing to
the large number of works it has loaned the exhibition, 1961: Order
and Chaos.
[1] As regards the artist's creative
period during the 1970s, the Casa das Histórias held an
exhibition The 70s - Folk Tales and Other Stories curated
by Ana Ruivo in 2010.