House of Stories Paula Rego inaugurates two exhibitions today

Two exhibitions are opening today at 6:30 pm at the Paula Rego House of Stories in Cascais.

“Paula Rego: 1980s” includes 52 large format works, mostly from private collections, some of them unpublished.

According to the museum, the exhibition will present some works that were never exhibited in Portugal because they were sold in London in the 1980s.

Also today, Casa das Histórias inaugurates in its space the exhibition of 34 works selected for the third edition of the Paula Rego Award, from students of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (FBAUL).

The third edition, the result of an invitation that Paula Rego made to the FBAUL, “will continue in 2020, extended to other institutions of artistic education, still to be considered,” said the coordinator of that entity, Catarina Alfaro.

“Paula Rego: Eighties” reflects a decade that coincides with personal, social and artistic changes that provoked in Paula Rego a feeling of freedom in relation to the expectations imposed on the way to “make art”, that would translate into a reformulation of its according to the House of Stories.

From 1981, Paula Rego definitively ceases to introduce collages in her works, in an attitude of artistic liberation and rupture that will give her a “new creative breath”.

Marital life, passion, jealousy, infidelity, revenge, themes that emerge in the 1981 “Red Monkey” series are explored with rawness and humor, and “are not conditioned by the limits of a conventional morality.”

The works of the exhibition are distributed in seven rooms of the House of Stories, and include, among others, the themes “The Operas” (1983), about drama and comedy in human relations, without artifice or hero.

In other rooms are “The Vivian Girls” (1984), the “Tribute to Dubuffet”, “In and out of the sea”, “The fables” of La Fontaine, and the series “Girl and dog”.

The exhibition will be open until May 26, 2019.