Paula Rego

This beautiful hardcover showcases the remarkable printmaking practice of British artist Paula Rego (1935–2022), whose radical art drew inspiration from a vast range of sources—from traditional folklore and fairy tales, to literary classics and nursery rhymes. For Rego, these sources conveyed essential truths about the world. She connected with these literary works in deeply personal ways, using them to articulate the conditions of her own life as well as work through her own dreams, anxieties, desires and fears. Here, three of the artist's most ambitious series of graphic works—Jane Eyre, Nursery Rhymes and Peter Pan—are explored in essays by Marco Livingstone, Rosanna McLaughlin and Marina Warner. They offer an insight into how the artist transformed this material into startlingly original, rebellious and unexpected images.

Born in Portugal but based in London for most of her life, Paula Rego (1935–2022) relentlessly exposed social grievances through her art. Her large, confrontational oil and pastel paintings—almost always of female subjects—draw upon the horrors found in both storybook narratives and women's lived experiences. They are dedicated to highly emotional themes such as political and sexualized violence, physical self-determination and mental health. Featuring more than 120 works spanning seven decades, The Personal and the Political explores the dichotomy of public and private in Rego's oeuvre: beginning with her early 1950s paintings criticizing the Estado Novo and including her famous Abortion series, her personal contribution criticizing the anti-abortion movement.