The Poacher
Paula Rego
17 December 2015 to 24 April 2016
Opening 17th of December at 6pm.
Curator: Catarina Alfaro
In 1990 Paula Rego was invited to begin the project of
residences for contemporary artists at the National Gallery in
London. Her status as First National Gallery Associate Artist
required the production of works that establish a direct
relationship with this collection over a stay of eighteen months in
a studio in the basement of the gallery. She did not
immediately accept this invitation.
"I was very scared and a bit daunted! But
to find one's way anywhere one has to find one's
own door, just like Alice, you see. You take too much of one
thing and you get to big, then you take too much of
another and you get too small. You've got to find your
own doorway into things… and I thought the only way you
can get into things is, so to speak, through the basement… which is
exactly where my studio is! So I can creep upstairs and snatch at
things, and bring them down with me to the basement, where I can
munch away at them. And what I bring down here from upstairs
varies a lot, but I always bring something back into my
den. I am a sort of poacher here, really, that's what I
am".
In Paula Rego's work, this encounter, whether
furtive or explicit, with the stories and images that tell them is
never translated into an attempt to illustrate the word, the novel
or the persistence of the cinematographic or theatrical images that
have stood as her striking images.
In compiling fragments from paintings taken from
here and there, Paula Rego takes stories and images from her memory
that are associated with her deepest visual impressions, aided by
new - but temporally distant - visual stimuli that
bring that memory up to date. It is precisely from this
confrontation with images from the past and their bringing up to
date in her visual and narrative experience/memory that emerges
this body of works conceived during and after this experience with
the National Gallery collection.
The Poacher, in the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego,
particularly highlights a series of works by Paula Rego that are
precisely the result of this encounter with museum collections or
those that are created after an invitation for an exhibition in
this museum context, without there necessarily being a relationship
with the collections.
It is in this condition as a poacher that stalks
its prey and draws back, to then be fused with it, that we should
look at the works present in this exhibition.
In Paula Rego's work, this encounter, whether furtive or
explicit, with the stories and images that tell them is never
translated into an attempt to illustrate the word, the novel or the
persistence of the cinematographic or theatrical images that have
stood as her striking images.
In compiling fragments from paintings taken from here and there,
Paula Rego takes stories and images from her memory that are
associated with her deepest visual impressions, aided by new -
but temporally distant - visual stimuli that bring that
memory up to date. It is precisely from this confrontation with
images from the past and their bringing up to date in her visual
and narrative experience/memory that emerges this body of works
conceived during and after this experience with the National
Gallery collection.
The Poacher, in the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, particularly
highlights a series of works by Paula Rego that are precisely the
result of this encounter with museum collections or those that are
created after an invitation for an exhibition in this museum
context, without there necessarily being a relationship with the
collections.
It is in this condition as a poacher that stalks its prey and
draws back, to then be fused with it, that we should look at the
works present in this exhibition.