Paula Rego: Power Games

An exploration of Paula Rego’s complex heroines and modern fairy-tale pictures.

The female protagonists of the Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego either come from real life or derive from the world’s great legends, fairy tales, and myths. As complicated heroines of our time, they have endured illegal abortions or fought against the limitations of traditional gender roles instead of dragons.

＂My favorite themes are power games and hierarchies.＂ Rego’s oeuvre is a tour de force of creativity. Endlessly versatile and inexhaustible, it is deeply rooted in pictorial worlds and stories from both past and present. This volume approaches the remarkable wealth of Rego’s multi-faceted universe through a range of different perspectives and tells of the power of history and emotions, women’s rights, and invisible structures of domination.

Contributors include Catarina Alfaro, Christa Binswanger, Cornelia Brink, Dulce Maria Cardoso, Elena Crippa, Ann Cvetkovich, Annie Ernaux, Emília Ferreira, Dominique Grisard, Marion Keller, Vera Marstaller, Marianne Meister-Notter, Victoria Miro, Leonor de Oliveira, Judith Rauser, Eva Reifert, Noemi Scherrer, Franziska Schutzbach, Jasper Warzecha, Anne Weber, Nick Willing, Andrea Zimmermann.

With a contribution by Anne Weber and an excerpt of Annie Ernaux’s The Happening.

Eva Reifert has been the Curator of 19th-Century and Modern Art at Kunstmuseum Basel since 2016.