Artists

Paula Rego

Press release

Paula Rego's career was marked by the need for constant change and invention, wary of relying on an artist's 'process' – a trap she fell into in the 1960s when she was making her collages. 'I had a process, and a way of doing things, so, and I thought if I follow that process in that way then something is bound to happen, and of course it doesn't work like that at all. You become academic then, because you have a process and the process is a killer. What you need is a discovery and invention.' (Rego in conversation with Cathy Courtney, 2003) Her life's transformations of style and discovery, however, had one important constant: drawing. 'I'm a drawrer', she told me once, inventing a new word. 'Your father was the painter, I'm the drawrer.' For Paula, drawing was her way into everything, figuring out her story, her picture, herself. It was how she understood the world, relationships, her feelings. It wasn't just a way of seeing, it was a complete exploration of her inner world. 'I go along with what happens; it's a physical thing ... I have frightened myself: unpleasant things come out, illnesses, some kind of death comes into the picture. Things come out of my own past that I hadn't thought of, but I allow it to happen exactly as it happens, by following whims.' (Rego at Abbot Hall, 2001) Up until the late 1980s, when Paula was already in her fifties, she drew almost exclusively from the imagination, not from life. It allowed her a greater freedom to invent, and as her main focus was not on naturalistic representation but on controlling the tone, expression and feeling of her subjects, it felt right. Drawing from the imagination allowed her to exaggerate the affects that better emphasised the story. But in the 1990s that all changed as she searched for a more mature representation of her increasingly nuanced perspective. Paula no longer needed to explore the expressionist style that delivered her often dark and complex stories through the back door. Now it was about finding the single image that could encapsulate the complex mix of emotions that she needed to process. That meant that from 1987 until her death, Paula drew almost exclusively from life. Storytelling continued to drive her pictures, but they were stories which became increasingly conflated with her own autobiographical experience. And her models, her women, became her foils, avatars for her relived past. Paula Rego's Women, is the first exhibition in Germany to examine the precise and deliberate drawings that define that golden period of her work. Each one tells a Rego story: a single image which encapsulates powerful internal feelings, particular and personal to her, that in turn, connect universally to us. Nick Willing, January 2026