‘Paula Rego, Visions of English Literature’, an exhibition curated by Hayward Gallery Touring in association with The Estate of Paula Rego is showing in the Lakeside Arts Djanogly Gallery (Nottingham) from the 21st of September 2024 to the 5th of January 2025. The exhibition is coupled with ‘Grayson Perry: Man Hours’ which is located in the adjoining rooms. Upon entering the gallery, you are first confronted with the Paula Rego exhibition, which aims to showcase the artists’ work in printmaking spanning 20 years, including etching plates and previously unseen sketches. The collection highlights Rego’s relationship with storytelling and its place within her life, along with its wider purpose. The lithographs and etchings, some hand coloured, are displayed in a uniform manner as one might view the pages of a storybook. Additional display cases include the copper plates, preparatory sketches and process used to create the final piece. Three series are included in the exhibition: nursery rhymes, Peter Pan and Jane Eyre.
Rego created her nursery rhyme series in 1989 when she illustrated a book for her granddaughter’s second birthday. Rego, who grew up under the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, used stories as an escape from the realities of her existence, to make sense of the world around her, and as a safe way of expressing the thoughts and feelings that she and others were forbidden to vocalise. She appreciated the dual nature of children’s stories which include pleasant and whimsical themes alongside the dark and harrowing, and recognised that children can enjoy a story without discriminating between these elements. They can accept the story in it’s entirety, in the same way that Rego had learnt to accept her own discordant reality in her childhood.
One common element in Rego’s work is the personification of animals and toys. We see this in the nursery rhyme series where there are a plethora of animals in human-like poses, using tools, wearing clothes, sporting human heads and expressions. Grayson Perry’s work features Alan Measles, his famously personified teddy bear that has a God-like significance in his inner world. It can be seen in the etching Reclining Artist, a self portrait.
