By Emily Harrison
Back in 2019, my mum, aunt and I went to see a retrospective of Paula Rego’s work at the MK Gallery. I don’t think I had, and haven’t since, left a gallery feeling so uncomfortable. Yet, simultaneously, so inspired.
Paula Rego (1935-2022) is a Portuguese artist exploring themes of, as the title of the exhibition summarised, ‘obedience and defiance’ in relation to female identity. Among her most unsettling works are her 1998 pastels of abortion. A referendum attempting to legalise abortion failed just before Rego’s 1998 series which led to her urge to ‘get justice for women… at least in the pictures… Revenge too…’. Rego was successful: she has been credited to have, at least partly, sparked the public campaign for the second referendum which took place in 2007, finally legalising abortion.
Untitled No. 1 (1998)
Paula Rego
Rego’s use of gestural brushstrokes, handling of deep red contrasted against stark white and blue panels of colour, combined with the direct eye contact between sitter and viewer, makes the painting above – similar to others in the series – a raw, confrontational depiction of a subject previously marginalised throughout the Western canon of art history. By portraying the very acts of obeying and defying in her painting, Rego herself obeys and defies society’s social parameters.
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