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Paula Rego at Tate Britiain
Reviews

From: Martin
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 02 December 2004

Review

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/rego/

There were no other men in the gallery, all the 20 or so people wandering about were women. Women's art. Friends, oldies, and lonelies, all seemed to be getting something out of Rego's narrative art. Her earlier abstract paintings are quite nice in an anachronistic way. I am not sure the figurative stuff is great, I hate pastels, even Degas can't really extract from the hand clutching stick as much as from the hand forced to accept the disconnect of the brush and paint.

She uses the stock stocky figures of the contemporary story-teller, the scale too seems familiar, there is none of the elegance that the old guys got from manipulating religious stories, no elan, just the heaviness of the hand scratching meaning from dust. Sometimes her images come off, the ones with leather boot, have that Balthusian impact of an unsettling image, shown, and thus lost.

Good for girls on their lunch hour, feeling the depression of male hegemony.

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