The Holburne Museum in the UK will host an exhibition exploring the strange relationship between artist Paula Rego and Francisco de Goya. The exhibition will run until 5 January 2025.
An exhibition exploring the notion of the uncanny in the work of Paula Rego (1935-2022) and Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), featuring 42 works by the Portuguese artist, opens on September 27 at the Holburne Museum in the United Kingdom.
Titled “Uncanny Visions: Paula Rego and Francisco de Goya,” the exhibition will be on display until January 5, 2025 at the Bath-based museum.
According to the museum’s website, this will be the first exhibition to show Goya’s “Los disparates” (1815-1823) and Paula Rego’s “Canciones infantiles” (1989) series together in their entirety.
The exhibition also includes a selection of three-dimensional objects by Paula Rego – sculptures and studio props – and, “For the first time, a selection of Goya prints that the artist owned and hung around her bed, these being the first and last images she looked at every day”.
Contacted by the Lusa agency about the number of works by Paula Rego present in the exhibition and their respective provenance, the museum responded by email that It will bring together 77 works in total, 42 by the Portuguese painter.
All loans come from public and private collections in the UK, including the family collection of Paula Rego, who left Portugal for London at the age of 17 to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she met her future husband, the English artist Victor Willing.
“Both Goya and Rego have long been associated with the concept of strangeness. The themes and images present in the works of both men are rooted in popular and folkloric elements, and are based on a sense of disconcerting and unsettling familiarity, whether through the absurdity of social rules, captured by Goya, or the cruelty of children’s verses, noted by Rego,” says a text about the exhibition sent to Lusa by the Holburne museum.
On the other hand, Goya’s “Los disparates” is highlighted by the museum as “a set of engravings that has received considerably less attention and public exposure than his other series.”
Paula Rego’s “Nursery Rhymes” is a series of over 30 etchings and prints made in 1989 that will be exhibited with five additional etchings made in 1994 to accompany an illustrated publication published by Thames & Hudson.
The exhibition explores how two artists, who lived a century apart, used similar visual motifs and narrative devices to convey a universal range of human emotions.
The exhibition tour was created to “examine the way in which Goya’s influence on Rego, recognized by the artist herself, is made visible through the media and techniques she usedas well as through some of its themes and aesthetics.”
“Visitors to this exhibition will be able to observe how Rego’s unique visual translation of traditional children’s songs taught to young children presents a degree of irony and a sinister touch close to the spirit of Goya,” the museum’s text also highlights.
In addition to the strange, the exhibition explores notions common to both artists, such as absurdity and satire, folklore, humor, violence, sensuality, deception, the supernatural, anthropomorphism and animalization.
“Encompassing the wonderful, strange and terrifying aspects of the human experience through the work of two Iberian artists with profound insight into the human soul, the exhibition is a unique opportunity to experience the technical, compositional and narrative mastery of two artistic giants,” the Holburne Museum’s text states.
Source: Observadora
