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拍品專文
A glowing large-scale example of Paula Rego’s celebrated pastels, the present work is an exquisite tribute to the artist’s friendship with writer and curator Fiona Bradley. Executed in 1997—the year that Bradley co-curated Rego’s acclaimed retrospective at Tate Liverpool—it demonstrates her consummate mastery of the medium that came to define her practice during this period. Richly-worked passages of layered colour imbue the sitter’s flesh with a luminous, visceral quality, capturing the play of light and shadow across her form. She gazes into the distance, one hand behind her head, as if caught in a moment of reverie. Within an oeuvre is rooted in imagined narratives, fairy tales and suggestive allegory, the present work is a rare example of a named portrait, taking its place alongside Rego’s depictions of Germaine Greer and the playwright Sir David Hare (1995 and 2005, National Portrait Gallery). Like Greer, Bradley established herself early on as a key champion of Rego’s work: currently Director of The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, she has written and spoken widely on her practice, authoring a significant monograph in 2002. Notably, nearly a quarter of a century after the Liverpool exhibition, Rego is currently back at Tate—this time in London—for her largest and most comprehensive UK retrospective to date.
Having spent her early career between London and her native Portugal, Rego settled permanently in the UK in the mid-1970s. Her elusive works, informed by sources as diverse as religious parables and Walt Disney animations, achieved widespread acclaim following her landmark exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1988. Following a prestigious residency at the National Gallery in 1990, however, Rego’s practice underwent an important stylistic shift. Her engagement with the museum’s collection of Old Master paintings inspired a fuller, more rounded approach to figuration, moving away from the flat, semi-abstract style of her early oeuvre. Her characters were no longer puppet-like figments, but rather confronted the viewer as living, breathing realities, wrought with strong lines and clear forms. This quality is evident here: Rego’s subject is rendered with radiant, volumetric clarity, from the checked folds of her dress to the individual strands of her hair. The detailing on the chair is picked out with crisp precision, while the shadows that fall across her face and body—as well as the flickering gloom behind—evince a subtle understanding of chiaroscuro effects. There are overtones, too, of artists such as Alice Neel, Lucian Freud and David Hockney, all of whom broke new ground for portraiture in the twentieth century.
Despite the move towards a cleaner figurative style, however, Rego’s embrace of pastels during this period allowed her to retain something of the raw, impulsive quality that had defined much of her earlier oeuvre. Inspired by Surrealist automatism, the artist had formerly experimented with techniques that allowed her to disconnect her hand and mind, including collage, rapid drawing and painting from the floor. Pastels, first adopted in her 1994 series Dog Women, provided the artist with a way of recapturing something of this subconscious physical magic. Bradley herself would note that the medium ‘is similarly visceral, and making the forms is part of a process intimately connected to the artist’s body’ (F. Bradley, Paula Rego, London 2002, p. 69). Rego, for her part, explained that ‘it’s like drawing and painting at the same time’: a duality borne out in the present work, where a sense of graphic intuition mingles with lustrous effects that recall the interaction of oil and canvas (P. Rego, quoted in L. Buck, ‘Paula Rego: prints of darkness’, The Art Newspaper, 1 October 2003). Like the sitter herself, seemingly caught in a daydream, the composition appears to float between states, evoking the hypnotic, twilit realm inhabited by Rego’s best works.
Having spent her early career between London and her native Portugal, Rego settled permanently in the UK in the mid-1970s. Her elusive works, informed by sources as diverse as religious parables and Walt Disney animations, achieved widespread acclaim following her landmark exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1988. Following a prestigious residency at the National Gallery in 1990, however, Rego’s practice underwent an important stylistic shift. Her engagement with the museum’s collection of Old Master paintings inspired a fuller, more rounded approach to figuration, moving away from the flat, semi-abstract style of her early oeuvre. Her characters were no longer puppet-like figments, but rather confronted the viewer as living, breathing realities, wrought with strong lines and clear forms. This quality is evident here: Rego’s subject is rendered with radiant, volumetric clarity, from the checked folds of her dress to the individual strands of her hair. The detailing on the chair is picked out with crisp precision, while the shadows that fall across her face and body—as well as the flickering gloom behind—evince a subtle understanding of chiaroscuro effects. There are overtones, too, of artists such as Alice Neel, Lucian Freud and David Hockney, all of whom broke new ground for portraiture in the twentieth century.
Despite the move towards a cleaner figurative style, however, Rego’s embrace of pastels during this period allowed her to retain something of the raw, impulsive quality that had defined much of her earlier oeuvre. Inspired by Surrealist automatism, the artist had formerly experimented with techniques that allowed her to disconnect her hand and mind, including collage, rapid drawing and painting from the floor. Pastels, first adopted in her 1994 series Dog Women, provided the artist with a way of recapturing something of this subconscious physical magic. Bradley herself would note that the medium ‘is similarly visceral, and making the forms is part of a process intimately connected to the artist’s body’ (F. Bradley, Paula Rego, London 2002, p. 69). Rego, for her part, explained that ‘it’s like drawing and painting at the same time’: a duality borne out in the present work, where a sense of graphic intuition mingles with lustrous effects that recall the interaction of oil and canvas (P. Rego, quoted in L. Buck, ‘Paula Rego: prints of darkness’, The Art Newspaper, 1 October 2003). Like the sitter herself, seemingly caught in a daydream, the composition appears to float between states, evoking the hypnotic, twilit realm inhabited by Rego’s best works.