Paula Rego: Looking
in
11 july 2019 - 27 november 2019
Although Paula Rego had produced some prints between 1952 and
1956, while still a young student at the Slade School of Fine Art,
it was only from the late 1980s onwards that she began to engage
consistently in this practice which, besides drypoint, etching and
aquatint, also includes lithography. While, in her painting, the
artist produces narratives that do not become exhausted in just one
single work, the use of engraving techniques enables her to
multiply stories through the development of thematic series,
intensifying all of their narrative sense through duplications and
intersections of images. The narrative deviations that she attempts
in the preparatory drawings anticipating the final work (which is
generally painted) or in the drawings that she engraves on the
lithographic stone or the zinc plate are also the vivid register of
the exploratory possibilities and variations in the images of her
work, where drawing, painting and engraving are regarded as
complementary processes.
This exhibition brings together a significant part of the
artist's graphic work, some preparatory drawings conceived for the
execution of her engravings and some copper plates on which the
engraving process was performed, as well as including her more
recent and lesser known engraving works.
Curatorship: Catarina Alfaro