Opening July 4, 2024, 6–9pm

The exhibition “Life Study” is the third solo exhibition by Paula Rego (1935 – 2022) in the gallery in Munich. In recent years, Rego has attracted a great deal of international attention. Retrospectives, such as the one at Tate Britain in London in 2021, as well as participation in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 honour her artistic works extensively.

Rego, who studied at the Slade School of Art in London from 1952 – 1956, represents an artistic attitude that is unmistakable. She translates political, social and pop cultural contexts into pictorial structures that reveal the abysses of our human existence and explore questions of conflict-laden relationship structures, violence, death and sexuality. Immoral and disciplined, she depicts those contexts in figures that appear powerful and strong in their self-confidence. Old masters such as Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez are obvious reference points in her artistic practice with her very own interpretation and continuation. The female body is emancipated from the male gaze and finds itself in independent images and themes. In the current exhibition, Jahn und Jahn is showing drawings and prints by Paula Rego from various work groups and periods. The drawings “Life Study For the Return of the Native 2” from 1992 and “Flagellation” from c. 2001 illustrate these named connections and their intermediate world. Rego composes her depictions from social contexts and her own phantasmagories; her works immediately stimulate the imagination and raise the question of what is happening to the figure in the picture, what state she is in and how the story will continue. Each of her prints – her graphic oeuvre comprises 280 etchings and lithographs – is a myth of its own and an inner continent which, like a daydream or a fairy tale, draws us in and casts a spell over us.

Paula Rego (1935 Lisbon – 2022 London) studied at the Slade School of Art in London from 1952 to 1956. From the second half of the 1950s she lived with her husband and their children mainly in Ericeira (Portugal) until the family moved to London in 1975. She has received numerous honorary doctorates, including from Oxford University (UK) in 2005, Universidade de Lisboa (PT) in 2011, and the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2015. In 2010, the artist was appointed “Dame Commander of the British Empire” by the British Queen. In 2009, the Casa das Historías Paula Rego museum dedicated to her opened in Cascais, near Lisbon. A larger complex of Rego's works, consisting of paintings and fabric figures, was exhibited in the central pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. On June 8, 2022, Paula Rego died in London at the age of 87. Her works are in important international museums at home and abroad.

Solo shows (selection): (planned) 2024/2025 Kunstmuseum Basel; 2022/2023 Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover; 2022 Museo Picasso, Málaga; 2021/2022 Kunstmuseum Den Haag; 2021 Tate Britain, London; 2020 Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; 2019/2020 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; 2018 Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris; 2013 Casa das Historías Paula Rego, Cascais (Portugal); 2012 Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; 2008 National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; 2007 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; 1997 Tate Gallery, London; 1988 Serpentine Gallery, London.