The Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego (1935-2022) ranks among the foremost and most exciting figurative painters of recent decades. Her fabulous world enthrals viewers with a frenzy of images, replete with cryptic humor, and as frankly dramatic as they are poignant. Rego’s oeuvre commands enormous power, above all where the fates of women are at stake. Figures, who in Walt Disney’s world represent perfect princesses or otherworldly witches, are in Rego’s hands depicted as perfectly natural women. In her work, it is women—nurturing, aiding, and coping with everyday life—who merit portrayal. One thing never featuring in her works, however, is the happy end. Throughout the decades, Rego has crafted complex, highly charged scenes of nightmarish proportions, revealing profound insights into human relations, into the dynamics of social, political, and sexual power. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung referred to her artworks as “crime scenes."
This comprehensive, special exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel is the first-ever presentation of her oeuvre in Switzerland. Her cosmos of paintings, mannequin-like objects, and graphic works is on display in a series of thematically arranged rooms, all of which are loci of power struggles, of the Self, of the privacy of family, of relations between the sexes and of political violence.
On this Sunday afternoon, there will be a guided tour in English of this special exhibit.
Cost admission plus CHF 5 for the tour.

Website
shop.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/de/guided-tours/8274

Where
Kunstmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Graben 16
4051 Basel

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