Retrospectively exhibited since 1988 (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) Paula Rego is an artist with an extensive and diverse work. In 1952, aged only 17, she left for London, the city where she began her studies at the Slade School of Fine Art as a scholarship student (FCG) and met Victor Willing, her husband from 1959 onwards. Overall, the sixties and seventies, in the career of this painter, correspond to a heterogeneous period in exploring pictorial techniques and languages. However, in terms of her family, this phase is defined as one of her most unhappy, due to private (death of her father and her husband's diagnosis of multiple sclerosis), economic, and political events (bankruptcy of the family business after the April Revolution and the sale of the house in Ericeira).

This untitled painting dates from 1972, when Paula Rego was still living between England and Portugal, until she settled permanently in the former country in 1976. Based on children's stories and her own memories, the artist states that she wants to tell stories with her painting, creating narratives and paths in which the outcome is mostly unknown. Within the field of the so-called new figuration that emerged in the 1960s, these paintings reflect the artist's emotional universe, where the figures are dismembered, inverted, recomposed and obliterated, with the compositional process functioning as a kind of catharsis. The organic fragments used, together with an anarchic dimension, are inheritors of the surrealism that marked the first decades of her production, together with the English Pop Art, present in her strong chromatic options. Created in stages, the work is developed according to a method of addition and subtraction, in which Paula Rego explores the techniques of painting, cutting, and collage. In a game of concealment and display, the result comprises several layers, where planes and figures alternate in status and significance, allowing for different readings.

RD