Review Paula Rego at Museum Folkwang

by Johanna Siegler // July 25, 2025

As I approach the final room of ‘The Personal and The Political’ at Museum Folkwang, the corridors begin to swell with sound. Laughter, the echo of hurried footsteps, a fragment of music and the thin, reedy sigh of what could be an aeolian harp. A group of women in watercolored dresses, part of a live performance, dart past, their jubilant voices ringing off the grey gleaming floors. It’s in this charged current of noise and movement that I encounter the final painting. Paula Rego’s ‘Love’ (1995) stages a lone woman in ambiguous repose on a backdrop of velvety garnet. Fabric spills outward in all directions, appearing endless, as if reaching toward the edges of an empty world. Her face tilts toward us as vulnerability pools quietly from her averted eyes. The rigid, patterned dress and the twist of her hands disrupt any notion of softness. There is no easy sensuality here. Instead, the work hums with a private, unnameable tension that unsettles the word “love” and replaces sentiment with something far stranger.

Paula Rego’s greatest gift as an artist and storyteller may lie in her ability to reveal how the grandest political truths often reside in the smallest, most intimate stories of love and cruelty. The retrospective in Essen resists a linear chronology, opting instead for a labyrinthine layout where early sketches, etchings and monumental pastels coexist and enter into diachronic conversations. Rego’s motifs cumulate, shift and are metabolized across bodies and media, forming an almost intertextual system. For nearly six decades, and from her earliest works onward, the artist has returned insistently to the legacy of António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship and its deeply ingrained chauvinistic rhetoric. Born in Lisbon in 1935 to Anglophile parents, Rego was sent to finishing school in Kent in the early 1950s, a displacement shaped by her family’s despair at the Estado Novo regime. What followed was a life lived between two national imaginaries: through her time at the Slade, her association with the London Group and her eventual settlement in England with the painter Victor Willing, Rego’s public biography would come to arc toward British institutional recognition. Still, the formal and political intelligence of her work remained tethered to the specters of Portugal’s authoritarian rule.

In ‘Hungry Dogs’ (1963), an early painting with a decidedly political referent, Rego transmutes a newspaper item into a dense field of contorting, kaleidoscopic forms. Referencing a real event in Francoist Spain, where poisoned meat intended for stray dogs claimed the lives of poor families, children and pets, Rego collapses species boundaries to expose the necropolitical logic of authoritarian rule, wherein human and non-human life alike are rendered expendable. This political throughline intensifies in a series of drawings from around 1970, in which Rego wields grotesque allegory and biting humour to confront the absurdities of late Salazarism and its colonial legacy. Works like ‘The Candidate’ (1970) and ‘The Cape of Storms’ (1969) caricature the state and the church as complicit agents of a farcical democracy, while exposing the mechanisms of violence that sustained power both in Portugal and its colonies.

As early as 1952, Rego sketches the crouching, feral figure that would become her now-mythic ‘Dog Woman.’ In the works that follow, the dog, whose symbolic charge is anchored in the tension between instinct and domestication, emerges as a polyvalent figure through which Rego probes various degrees of heteronomy. In the infamous ‘Waiting for Food’ (1994), a woman’s animalistic crouch registers the deep internalization of authority. But it is in her ‘Girl and Dog’ series (1986) that Rego most forcefully dismantles sentimental tropes of domesticity. What appears, at first glance, as innocent scenes of care—girls feeding, grooming, cradling dogs in a saccharine, sun-drenched palette—quickly reveals itself as something far more disquieting. The girls restrain, lift, press against their animals with an unsettling poise in gestures of domination. As art historian Agustina Bessa-Luís observes, the dog, anthropomorphized and castrated into docility, becomes a proxy for the patriarchal subject in the role of father or husband,”whom one pretends to serve in order to dominate him through servitude.” These images turn the domestic sphere into a site of covert kinslaying. While often interpreted through the biographical lens of Rego’s husband’s illness, their resonance extends beyond, illuminating structures of control and submission with archetypal precision. “The personal,” the curators note simply, “is territorial.”

Care and cruelty entwine again in the adjoining section dedicated to Rego’s ‘Nursery Rhymes.’ Hung along a dimly lit corridor, the small etchings and aquatintas are accompanied by the eerie, lilting voice of actress Cennet Rüya Voss reading the verses aloud. Published in 1989 as a portfolio of 25 prints, the series draws on the seemingly benign world of British children’s rhymes. Rego returned to these texts through her granddaughter—a rediscovery that coincided with a deepening of her Jungian analysis. This encounter reoriented her toward the archetypal and the latent violence embedded in the structures of early narrative. The rhymes’ historical entanglement with misogyny and mechanisms of social control offered fertile ground for Rego’s charged, often subversive reimaginings. In ‘Humpty Dumpty,’ perhaps the series’ most searing image, the famously shattered egg bears the face of Salazar. Around him, mounted figures that evoke military and monarchical might, circle helplessly. The sly iconoclasm of the image is unambiguous. The egg, irreparably broken, becomes a vessel for authoritarian fictions and their irrevocable fall.

A narrow, darkened corridor marks a tonal shift in the exhibition. This liminal passage opens onto a sequence of Rego’s etchings from the ‘Abortion’ series (1999), hung tightly like visual footnotes that draw visitors into close proximity. These eight etchings were a deliberate departure from Rego’s usual practice. She reworked motifs from her pastel paintings into smaller, reproducible formats, making them easier to circulate and exhibit widely. In a kind of quiet continuity that feels like a procession, the corridor opens into a rotunda-like chamber that functions as the exhibition’s emotional and architectural fulcrum and feels like the heart of this labyrinth. Here, Rego’s large-scale ‘Abortion’ paintings arrive in full pastel force, flanking ‘Oratório,’ a multimedia assemblage from 2009, like an altar or fictional jury box. Created in 1998–99, the pastels emerged in direct response to a failed Portuguese referendum on legalizing abortion up to the 10th week of pregnancy. The proposal was long demanded since the fall of the Salazar dictatorship, during which Catholic ideals of motherhood had been zealously upheld by state and church alike. Despite parliamentary approval, the reform was halted by a public vote marked by low turnout and a narrow conservative majority.

Initially untitled, the series presents women of different ages and backgrounds. Their situations remain individualized yet ultimately interlinked, as so often in Rego’s work, through their protagonists’ distinctive bodily posture. A clinical silence clings to the objects within these works, lodged in the chair’s hard lines, the basin’s empty mouth, the stiff, brutal pleats of fabric. At times, the eye slips and skates across the image, registering only colour—all fever-reds and milk-blues—before returning to the body. When the referendum was revisited in 2007 and abortion was finally legalized in Portugal, Rego’s ‘Abortion’ series was widely credited with shifting public sentiment. The pastels, and later, the etchings, gave image to the silenced, and in doing so, reframed the political through the force of the personal.

The curators at Museum Folkwang resist framing Rego’s work as merely autobiographical or nationally specific. Instead, the exhibition foregrounds her deep engagement with the narrative structures of moral indoctrination, nation-building and its political imaginaries and other, more mundane mythologies that shape collective belief. Through careful sequencing and sharp didactics, her art is shown to both operate within and subvert the aesthetically naturalized fictions that underlie gender, nationhood and power.

The final chamber gathers Rego’s most symbolically loaded and intimate works that interrogate religious iconography and associated myths of sexual transgression and retribution. One painting references the 19th-century Portuguese novel ‘The Crime of Father Amaro,’ in which a priest impregnates and ultimately destroys a young woman. ‘Love’ (1995) appears as the quiet epilogue to these potent scenes. After the brutal directness of the abortion pastels, even Rego’s most decorative, benign ‘Dog Woman’ reads differently. The composition borrows from the tradition of the reclining nude, from Ingres to Boucher, only divests it of coherence. Without its title, one comes to think, a scene of abortion might be almost indistinguishable from one of love. Even in the exhibition’s most innocuous moment, the aesthetic is rendered irrevocably political.