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Lot Essay
Critically poised between intense physical pleasure and pain Paula Rego's Birth 1971 conveys the human figure and its predicament through an unfettered freedom of expression which acts as an immediate and striking contrast to the more formal and narrative character of her later, renowned style. Executed in the formative years after Rego had graduated from The Slade, Birth constitutes part of a body of works completed in this period which reveal a direct refutation of the formal academism that had been championed by the school. Revelling in the pure materiality of colour and line, Birth draws upon the influences of Art Brut and Surrealism to comment on her social and personal reality through a blending of the visceral and psychological. These heady explorations, which passionately combine the personal with the political, were to form the integral foundations upon which Rego would develop her more latently affecting illustrative images.
In 1959 while on a visit to London, just three years after leaving The Slade, Rego saw an exhibition of the work of Jean Dubuffet. Experiencing his impulsive, childlike aesthetic was a revelation for her, 'I discovered Dubuffet and it released me. Whatever releases one about making art is beneficial. It got me back in touch with being a kid again on the floor, in fact I began to work on the a table, and play- and play.' (Rego, quoted in J. McEwen, Paula Rego, London, 1993, p. 56) The paintings which ensued, of which Birth is an immaculate example, convey a painterly, tactile immediacy in which the whole body is physically and visually implicated. Exulting in the unashamed messiness of applying the oil paint directly from the tube to the canvas, Rego employs her fingers as expressive smearing implements. In a work brimming with corporeal incident, the physicality of artist's hand is also startlingly present, transformed into a swirling palimpsest within the impasto.
Completed after the birth of her third child, this early work decisively resists a depiction of an idealised mother-love. Rego initially addressed the subject of birth and motherhood in a painting of 1959 and once again she returns to it with an equalling visceral force and ambivalence. The role of motherhood for Rego was decidedly not a creative substitute for art-making: 'There's nothing creative about having babies' she states, 'There's just this thing inside you and it comes out. That's all. It has nothing to do with imagination.' (Rego, quoted in J. McEwen, Paula Rego, London, 1993, p.56) Gouged out in bloody hues, the abstracted maternal body in Birth is a site of antagonised and conflicted space. Penetrated from within and without the conflation of shapes and symbols within the female form combine to present a work which is as much about childbirth and a kind of primal vitality as it is about sex, pain and death.
Painted three years before the Carnation Revolution 1974 which deposed the dictatorship of Antnio de Oliveria Salazar, Birth pre-empts the labour pangs of her native Portugal becoming a visualisation of the plundered motherland birthing a new and, as of yet, undefined national identity. In this respect it acts as an important companion piece to another important work from the time, Salazar vomiting the Homeland 1960, in which Salazar is configured as a violent spectre bodily expulsing the country on which he has gorged himself. Painted over a decade later rather than at the height Salazar's regime, Birth ventures a mildly optimistic, though nonetheless uncertain, vision for the fate of Portugal.
A work fundamentally engaged with the primal expressions of humanity, Birth ultimately exceeds a comment on personal or even female experience and becomes a projection of the passions and violence of life itself.
In 1959 while on a visit to London, just three years after leaving The Slade, Rego saw an exhibition of the work of Jean Dubuffet. Experiencing his impulsive, childlike aesthetic was a revelation for her, 'I discovered Dubuffet and it released me. Whatever releases one about making art is beneficial. It got me back in touch with being a kid again on the floor, in fact I began to work on the a table, and play- and play.' (Rego, quoted in J. McEwen, Paula Rego, London, 1993, p. 56) The paintings which ensued, of which Birth is an immaculate example, convey a painterly, tactile immediacy in which the whole body is physically and visually implicated. Exulting in the unashamed messiness of applying the oil paint directly from the tube to the canvas, Rego employs her fingers as expressive smearing implements. In a work brimming with corporeal incident, the physicality of artist's hand is also startlingly present, transformed into a swirling palimpsest within the impasto.
Completed after the birth of her third child, this early work decisively resists a depiction of an idealised mother-love. Rego initially addressed the subject of birth and motherhood in a painting of 1959 and once again she returns to it with an equalling visceral force and ambivalence. The role of motherhood for Rego was decidedly not a creative substitute for art-making: 'There's nothing creative about having babies' she states, 'There's just this thing inside you and it comes out. That's all. It has nothing to do with imagination.' (Rego, quoted in J. McEwen, Paula Rego, London, 1993, p.56) Gouged out in bloody hues, the abstracted maternal body in Birth is a site of antagonised and conflicted space. Penetrated from within and without the conflation of shapes and symbols within the female form combine to present a work which is as much about childbirth and a kind of primal vitality as it is about sex, pain and death.
Painted three years before the Carnation Revolution 1974 which deposed the dictatorship of Antnio de Oliveria Salazar, Birth pre-empts the labour pangs of her native Portugal becoming a visualisation of the plundered motherland birthing a new and, as of yet, undefined national identity. In this respect it acts as an important companion piece to another important work from the time, Salazar vomiting the Homeland 1960, in which Salazar is configured as a violent spectre bodily expulsing the country on which he has gorged himself. Painted over a decade later rather than at the height Salazar's regime, Birth ventures a mildly optimistic, though nonetheless uncertain, vision for the fate of Portugal.
A work fundamentally engaged with the primal expressions of humanity, Birth ultimately exceeds a comment on personal or even female experience and becomes a projection of the passions and violence of life itself.