Matthew Carr
New Works
24 Jun - 19 Jul 2008
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Summer Exhibition
24 Jul - 4 Sep 2008
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Paula Rego
A major Retrospective of her Graphic works
21 Jun - 21 Sep 2008
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Paula Rego: Paintings, Prints and Drawings
15 October 2004 until 23 January 2005
A major exhibiiton of Rego's paintings, prints and drawings from 1997-2004 currently on show at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Oporto, www.serralves.pt
John Davies
18 October 2004 until 23 January 2005
Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao www.museobilbao.com
travelling to the Valencia Institute of Modern Art from 10 March - 22 May 2005.
This is the first full-scale exhibition of the work of John Davies, looking at almost forty years of making sculpture.
This exhibition has been selected in close collaboration with the artist. This is the first time that he has had an opportunity to set out work from the whole of his creative life and it is evident that he cares enormously. The density of the display will strike the visitor immediately on entering. This is deliberate. We have separated the presentation into main chapters but we have also stressed continuity and richness in the work.
The three main sections of this exhibition correspond to the three decades of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Paula Rego
27 October 2004 until 2 January 2005
An exhibition of the work of Paula Rego will open at Tate Britain on 27 October. The exhibition is the first in Tate Britain's new biennial series of concise exhibitions featuring the work of senior British artists. Rego is one of the most respected painters working in Britain today and the exhibition will include a selection of key drawings and paintings drawn from several phases of her long career.
Paula Rego was born in Portugal in 1935. Her works are distinguished by their complex and dramatic narratives which take both real and imagined stories as their starting points. Beginning with these sources, Rego allows the stories to evolve out of the process of making the work. The finished pictures are never simple illustrations; the characters and the course of the action change and develop as she works.
Among the works featuring in the exhibition are Rego’s paintings of the mid-1960s. These are filled with semi-abstract figures and have strong links to Surrealism and the technique of automatic drawing. Many of these works respond to the political climate in Portugal in the 1960s under the dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. More recently, Rego has turned her attention to contemporary social injustices. Her work Triptych 1998, included in this display, is a response to a referendum recently held in Portugal on the subject of legalising abortion. Also included, and shown for the first time in this exhibition, is a major new triptych titled The Pillowman made in response to Martin McDonagh‘s play at the National Theatre in 2003.
During the 1980s Rego made some of her best-known works, many of which depict domestic scenes and relationships. Less overtly political and more autobiographical in their subject matter, these works investigate femininity. Works such as The Dance 1988 depict a variety of female roles and explore how identity may be constructed through the relationships that exist among women as well as those between women and men. Rego’s recent monumental work Betrothal; Lessons; Shipwreck; After Marriage à la Mode by Hogarth 1999 continues her investigation of these relationships. Taking as her starting point Hogarth’s seminal series of paintings about a doomed arranged marriage, Rego transported the action to 1940s Portugal, telling the story of the negotiation and subsequent marriage in the form of a triptych that also alludes to the politics of Portuguese colonialism.
This display will include important works drawn from the Tate Collection as well as loans from public and private collections. Highlighting Rego’s use of a variety of media and the recurrent themes in her work, the display will focus on specific points of connection between her early, mid-career and very recent work.
The exhibition is selected by Tate Curator Kathryn Rattee in close collaboration with the artist. A 16-page full-colour booklet (£2.50) will be available at Tate Shops along with Fiona Bradley’s recent book on Paula Rego for Tate Publishing’s Modern Artists series (£12.99).
Lucian Freud
29 January 2005 until 2 May 2005
The Waterhall Gallery of Modern Art,
Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery
Chamberlain Square, Birmingham
John Davies, Escultura y Dibujo
8 February 2005 until 12 March 2005
Galeria Marlborough S.A, Madrid
http://www.galeriamarlborough.com
John Davies, Sculptures and Drawings since 1968
10 March 2005 until 22 May 2005
Institut Valencia d'Art Modern, Valencia
Celia Paul- Paintings and Works on Paper
19 March 2005 until 11 June 2005
at the Grave's Art Gallery, Sheffield
Manolo Valdés
2 April 2005 until 22 May 2005
at the Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy
Dale Chihuly
28 May 2005 until 15 January 2006
Gardens of Glass: Chihuly at Kew is the first exhibition of its kind to be held in Europe. A spectacular sequence of organically shaped and vibrantly coloured glass sculptures will be set throughout Kew’s 300-acre garden landscape and inside the great glasshouses. The exhibition has been specifically designed to respond to Kew’s living collections, landscape, architecture and vistas and the visitor’s experience of the work will alter dramatically from day to night and from season to season.
Dale Chihuly is a leading figure of contemporary glass and has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally, from Venice to Jerusalem, Iceland to Japan. Gardens of Glass, sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline, will include Chihuly’s newest series of work, Fiori, which has never been exhibited in Europe. The exhibition will also include some of Chihuly’s best-loved series of work, including Macchia, Ikebana and Chandeliers.
Professor Sir Peter Crane, Director of Kew: ‘Dale Chihuly creates glass sculpture on an unrivalled scale – a scale to match the majestic environment of Kew. Wherever Chihuly and his team work they create a fantastic sense of excitement. Gardens of Glass will be the unmissable exhibition of 2005 and we are thrilled to host it.’
The Sun at Kew Gardens can currently be seen at the north end of the Princess of Wales Conservatory. An advance piece to the main exhibition, The Sun reflects the vibrant colours and monumental scale of the work to come. Standing at over four metres high and four metres wide and weighing a total of 4,600 pounds, it is made up of hundreds of pieces of hand-blown glass.
Stephen Conroy
28 June 2005 until 26 August 2005
The Gallery Marlborough Monaco is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works by Stephen Conroy, one of the foremost contemporary Scottish artists. His work forms a dynamic dialogue between the art of the present and that of the past and proposes a new approach to figurative painting.
Born in 1964 in Helensburgh, Scotland Conroy studied at the Glasgow School of Art. The masterpieces of the past were his principal source of inspiration, in which we can identify marks of the great masters such as Caravaggio, Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Poussin, Goya, Manet and Seurat. Although he sought inspiration in the past, he invents his own pictorial language. Since 1989 he has gained worldwide recognition. In 1998 Conroy won the The Grand Prize of H.R.H. Prince Rainer III, Prince Pierre of Monaco Foundation .
In his early works, individual or group portraits, Conroy alluded to classical painting and presented, with a remarkable maturity, his protagonists in an almost theatrical atmosphere. From 1990 Stephen Conroy invented his own pictorial language, exploring with his enigmatic models movement of the figure in space, their gestures and postures. His life-size paintings portray human figures – men dressed in black-and-white, surrounded by their shadows, in a pink pale background combined with dark and white vertical stripes. Conroy’s paintings convey great sensibility and sincerity: the starkness and the "nakedness" of Conroy’s heroes invite us to share with them their agonies and their thoughts.
The works of Stephen Conroy are held in several public collections such as. The Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland ; The British Museum, London ; The British Council, London ; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Stephen Conroy lives and works in Scotland.
For further information and images please contact
Elena Kotoufou at ekotoufou@marlborough-monaco.com or
Mary Miller at mmiller@marlboroughfineart.com
Manolo Valdés
8 July 2005 until 21 August 2005
Palazzo Pubblico, Magazzini del Sale, Siena, Italy
John Davies
14 July 2005 until 2 September 2005
Drawings 1967-2005 Institut Valencià d'Art Modern, Valencià, Spain
John Davies
4 August 2005 until 16 October 2005
Escultura y Paisaje
Fundación ASTROC, Castillo de Bendinat En Calvià, Palma, Mallorca, Spain
Paula Rego
6 August 2005 until 24 September 2005
A major assessment of prints and works on paper by this important international artist at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh. The exhibition is being developed with the artist and Marlborough Fine Art, London. The catalogue raisonne entitled "Paula Rego - The complete graphic work", which was published by T. G. Rosenthal in 2004, forms the basis of this exhibition.
Manolo Valdés
2 September 2005 until 9 October 2005
Centre Cultural Fontana d'Or de la Fundació Caixa de Girona, Spain
Paula Rego
12 November 2005 until 22 January 2006
Brighton Museum & Art Gallery
Royal Pavilion Gardens
Brighton
BN1 4EE
Daniel Enkaoua
4 December 2005 until 30 December 2005
Galerie Mokum, Amsterdam
30 December 2005
Paula Rego
4 February 2006 until 7 May 2006
Victoria Art Gallery
Bridge Street
Bath
BA2 4AT
Spirit of Trees: Charcoal Drawings 1980-2005
4 March 2006 until 7 May 2006
by John Hubbard Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew touring to The Naughton Gallery, Queen's University, Belfast 9 June-18 August 2006 The Ava Gallery, Clandeboye, Bangor, Ulster 14 June-18 August 2006
Frank Auerbach - Recent Work at Marlborough NY
8 March 2006 until 8 April 2006
The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce that the exhibition Frank Auerbach: Recent Work will open on March 8 and continue through April 8, 2006. This keenly anticipated show of recent work will be Auerbach’s first in New York since 1998 and the extraordinary success of his retrospective exhibition mounted by the Royal Academy, London, in 2001. Thirty-four paintings and drawings, all produced since the highly prestigious Royal Academy show, will be on view.
Working always and resolutely from the model, Auerbach’s paintings and drawings, each superficially the result of a single session but finished only after countless previous sittings, are wonderfully alive with a sense of immediacy. A presence as a raw truth. As Auerbach’s sitters tend to be family and friends, so his landscapes are of corners of London close to the studio and known intimately to Auerbach. The same process of constant reworking, from sketches made on the spot, produces wonderfully exciting images of great invention and freshness. A painter of great integrity, Auerbach’s true international standing, now recognized, is being ever more firmly established. To quote Lucian Freud, “For me he’s the best painter working today.”
Intensely layered and richly painted portraits such as Head of Catherine Lampert, 2004-05; Reclining Head of Julia, 2005 and Head of Ruth Bromberg, 2004-05, will be included in the Marlborough exhibition, joined by Auerbach’s distinctive depictions of North London’s Mornington Crescent, with five paintings capturing this location throughout the seasons, including Mornington Crescent – Summer Morning II, 2004 and Christmas Tree at Mornington Crescent, 2004-05. Equally of note are the artist’s portraits of his son, Jake (Head of Jake, 2004-05) and multiple portraits of David Landau (Head of David Landau, 2003-04; David Landau Seated, 2002-03 and Head of David Landau, 2005). These works situate Auerbach’s talent at the zenith of figure painting in the Twentieth Century, with artistic ancestors such as Soutine, Beckmann and Kokoschka and most importantly, Giacometti and De Kooning.
Norman Rosenthal writes eloquently of Auerbach’s work in the Royal Academy catalogue:
In the case of Auerbach, we see consistently in all of his paintings an intimate glimpse of a world full of atmospheric reality: a small corner of London which is his own arena, as well as an intimate group of lovers and friends, his patient models. Landscapes (or perhaps we should say townscapes) and models are depicted with a near-desperate intensity that creates a deliberate awkwardness between analysis and expression, which is always striving for the balance of objective depiction and emotional realism through paint. Sometimes, there is a sense of breakdown or inadequacy that is part of the fragile, painted poetry that lies at the heart of his depictions, whether drawn or painted. … In conveying a kind of existential fear, Auerbach’s paintings act as a therapeutic release. (Royal Academy, London, 2001, p. 12)
Born an only child in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach was sent to school in England in 1939 as a refugee from Nazi Germany and never saw his parents again. Displaying an aptitude for art from his early years, Auerbach attended St. Martin’s School of Art and Borough Polytechnic Institute, where he studied with English painter David Bomberg. Bomberg’s impression on Auerbach was decisive, as he instilled in him a fundamental respect for figure drawing with an unorthodox, energetic approach which continues to inform his work today. Auerbach graduated with honors from the Royal College of Art in 1955 and a year later his first solo exhibition was held at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery, London. Since then, Auerbach’s work has been the subject of over 50 solo exhibitions in galleries and museums and was the winner of the Lion d’Or at the 1986 Venice Bienniale. Recent notable exhibitions beside the Royal Academy in 2001 include a solo show at the National Gallery of Art, London in 1995; Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2000, and most recently at Galería Marlborough, Madrid and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 2002, and Marlborough Fine Art, London in 2004.
Frank Auerbach is represented in over forty museum collections including those of the Art Institute of Chicago; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid and the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Gallery, London.
Auerbach and Freud at the V&A
25 April 2006 until 29 May 2006
South Kensington
Cromwell Road
London SW7 2RL
Paula Rego
19 May 2006 until 30 June 2006
University Gallery
Northumbria University
Library Building
Sandyford Road
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
NE1 8ST
Avigdor Arikha at the British Museum
29 June 2006 until 7 January 2007
Avigdor Arikha From Life: Drawings and Prints 1965-2005 at the British Museum, London
Matthew Carr
14 September 2006 until 15 October 2006
Marlborough Gallery, Inc. 40 West 57th Street NY 10019 New York USA www.marlboroughgallery.com Matthew Carr, an artist in his early 50s, has until recently rarely exhibited more than once every ten years. After attending art school in London in the early 1970s, he was taken up by the famous art dealer Robert Fraser, whom Paul McCartney had once described as "one of the most influential people of the London 'Sixties Scene'." In his first gallery, Fraser had shown Dine, Warhol and Gilbert & George in the 1960s, and then Warhol's proteges Basquiat and Haring in his second gallery in the 1980s along with Carr, who was drawn into that edgy New York scene, sadly at great cost to his art. It took him almost 20 years to free himself from drug addiction, during which he held only one further exhibition at Wildenstein's London gallery in 1993. Fully recovered by 2000, he prepared an exhibition of arresting, conte' pencil works, predominantly heads, for Marlborough Fine Art, London, which signalled his re-dedication to his artistic talent and vision. Although Carr used to do some portraits on commission, notably of the singer Diana Ross and the historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin, today he prefers to choose his own models from among friends, neighbours and willing strangers encountered in the street. Since the year 2000 he has executed over 400 portrait heads on paper, all in monochrome, on a prepared charcoal background. Until this year, the portraits - whether of prisoners from London's notorious Wormwood Scrubs where Carr held weekly art classes, of blind sitters for whose charity, Action for the Blind, he is a Trustee, or of local shopkeepers and tradesmen - remained unnamed. The artist felt that they needed no anecdotal explanation or patronising sympathy. In this exhibition, sitters' first names are given, but still leaving any well-known among them to be recognized by their friends. Marlborough's exhibition will be centered on two of Carr's new, large works. The first is a polyptych of 14 different portrait heads, entitled Tenement Shanghai, 2005-2006, and measuring 70 3/4 x 73 3/4 inches. For this work, Carr traveled to China as he wished both to be anonymous in a large city where he felt free from pressure and to study a different physiognomy. The subjects are for the most part inhabitants of a single tenement, most of whom had never had a Caucasian in their home. Reviewing the 2003 Marlborough exhibition, London's Daily Telegraph art critic Richard Dorment recounted the unnerving experience to which all those sitters must have submitted themselves: Hunched over a stool about 18 inches from my face and turning a harsh electric light towards me, he asked me not to move a muscle for an hour and a half or more. During each of our three sittings there was no conversation, just tedious hours sitting in frozen-faced silence, when, aware of eyes boring into me with frightening intensity I listened to the scratching of pencil on paper and the ticking of my wrist-watch. But the results of this working method have an emotional life attained by few other modern draughtsmen. By contrast the works in this exhibition have all been created in daylight. Carr's preferred way of working is as he describes in "very intense blasts of concentration with no distraction." Earlier instances have included weeks spent drawing mummies in the catacombs of Palermo, a trip to Jamaica, and also the London suburb of Southall to draw portraits of the inhabitants, many of whom are Sikhs. The second large work in the show represents an entirely new departure for Carr, signalling one may surmise his renewed confidence in his skills of observation and invention. He has assembled a pentaptych - five abstracted passages of weather-beaten tombstones - at Whitby on the eastern English coast, measuring 54 by 68 inches in total. The site has a brooding, Bronte-esque atmosphere and is where Dracula is reputed to have first tasted English blood. The churchyard sits high on a cliff overlooking the North Sea where the stones are constantly blasted by salt, wind and sea, combined with sulphur coming up from under the cliffs to create unique and very beautiful patterns of erosion. What emerges are five richly textured compositions in which one may read the poetry of sky, clouds, mountains, rivers, trees and rocks at will. In Britain, love of landscape was learnt from the Netherlands when, in the 17th century, several Dutch painters settled in England, following in the footsteps of Flemish portraitists a century earlier. Carr's new, severely disciplined series of drawings of trees share the compositional angularity and close observation of a later Dutch master, Van Gogh, himself inspired by printmakers from the East. As with photography, sacrificing the seductive qualities of color for black and white emphasizes the rhythmical and formal structures of the composition. Within these restricted means, Carr shows himself to be a master of the tools at his disposition, offering the opportunity for people to enjoy the intimate chamber music of his craft in a compelling but utterly unhistrionic way.
Paula Rego
9 October 2006 until 15 October 2006
Royal College of Arts
Kensington Gore
London
SW7 2EU
Over the years Paula Rego and the Royal College of Art Printmaking department have developed a longstanding and rewarding relationship. Rego has been a guest artist to the department on several occasions, producing a number of prints with the printmaking technicians. Over the years, she has generously contributed several prints to the department's publications program, whereby artists donate work with the proceeds going to support printmaking students. In 1987 Rego completed the etching 'Young Predators' for the program and in 2005 she produced a series of three lithographs based on the theme of the
life studio. Rego is currently working on a new series with the department which is due to be completed and will be for sale in late 2006.
Cathie Pilkington
28 October 2006 until 17 December 2006
Cathie Pilkington's recent work is on show with Emma Talbot's in an external exhibition at The Metropole Galleries in Folkestone.
The Metropole Galleries, The Leas, Folkestone, CT20 2LS www.metropole.org.uk
Paula Rego: Prints and Works on Paper
18 November 2006 until 14 January 2007
Harrogate Museums and Arts
Mercer Art Gallery
Swan Road
Harrogate HG1 2SA
http://www.harrogate.gov.uk/harrogate-995
A Tribute to Chen Yifei 1946 - 2005
9 January 2007 until 3 February 2007
Marlborough Gallery Inc. 40 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 http://www.marlboroughgallery.com
Tel: 212-541-4900; Fax: 212-541-4948
Maggi Hambling
6 February 2007 until 29 April 2007
No Straight Lines, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge A great many people claim not to be able to ‘draw a straight line’. Maggi Hambling sees no straight lines in any part of nature she is moved to draw: people, animals or the sea. Drawing is the most direct and intimate of the artist’s strategies and at the core of all her work. She is one of very few contemporary draughtsmen of real distinction. In each of these 20 drawings, together with rarely-seen sketchbooks, Hambling achieves a potent language of marks. The drawings range from the powerful Rhinoceros in Ipswich Museum, 1963 (above), drawn when the artist was seventeen, to the delicate drawing of Sir Georg Solti conducting, 1985, and include memorable images of the artist’s parents, of Amanda Barrie, John Berger, Stephen Fry and Henrietta Moraes. A single bronze sculpture – ironically titled Line, created in 1996 – will form the centrepiece of the exhibition. Her most recent work, on show here for the first time, encapsulates the energy of the waves of the North Sea (below). In charcoal, graphite or ink, a unique life-force is manifest. And there are no straight lines. Maggi Hambling, born in Suffolk in 1945, is a distinguished painter and sculptor whose work can be seen in the British Museum, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Collection and many other public collections in the UK and abroad. Her sculpture of Oscar Wilde was unveiled in central London in 1998 and Scallop for Benjamin Britten was installed on Aldeburgh beach in 2003. Her work is represented by Marlborough Fine Art, London, who have also produced the exhibition catalogue. The loan of drawings to this exhibition by the Ashmolean Museum, British Museum, Tate Collection, private collections and the artist herself is gratefully acknowledged. The Museum is open Tuesday – Saturday: 10.00 – 17.00, Sunday: 12.00 - 17.00 and Bank Holiday Mondays. Admission to the permanent collections and to temporary exhibitions is FREE. Website:
Frank Auerbach
6 March 2007 until 10 June 2007
Etchings and Drypoints 1954-2006
The Fitzwilliam Museum
Trumpington Street
Cambridge
CB2 1RB
The Fitzwilliam Museum presents its complete collection of Auerbach’s prints ranging from the rare series of drypoint nudes made in 1954 to his most recent and boldest etchings. The subjects are predominantly the artist’s friends and family who sit regularly for him in his Camden Town studio, although there are also landscapes.
Stephen Conroy
2 May 2007 until 5 June 2007
Paula Rego
23 June 2007 until 30 October 2007
Birminghham Museum
Paula Rego has an international reputation as an artist who paints, draws and works in print. This survey exhibition of her prints and drawings represents the first time that her work has been given a major showing in Birmingham.
Born in Lisbon in 1935, she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1950s. London became her permanent residence in 1976, receiving her first solo show at a commercial gallery in 1982. The sequence of graphic images that she began to produce in 1987 with the Girl and Dog series parallels her concerns as a painter, but also shows her independent approach to the print medium and to its own long association with storytelling.
The thirty-one images in etching and aquatint that make up Nursery Rhymes are outstanding examples of Rego’s ability to disturb and transform a familiar text into something that is often dream-like and at the same time genuinely disturbing. A triptych in pastel after Hogarth becomes the jumping off point for four etchings where she takes the opportunity to extend the possible interpretation of a loveless marriage
In the 23 lithographs of Jane Eyre, Rego produces some of her strongest and most simplified images, while creating a world of imaginative readings. The psychological drama of the book is here re-interpreted through distortions of scale, cruel expressions of human relations, and stark contrasts with light and shade. This series will be exhibited alongside the subsequent expansive conté drawing Wide Sargosso Sea.
The integral relationship of drawing to Rego’s painted and graphic work and, in turn, the influence that her printmaking has had on her drawing will be explored in a rare showing of working drawings, and new large-scale drawings that are being exhibited for the first time. The further extension of Rego’s creative world into printed book form will be represented with publications from the Folio Society and Enitharmon Press.
Two lunchtime events:
Paul Rego in conversation on Thursday 28 June at 1pm; and the artist Paul Coldwell talking about working as her printer on Thursday 5 July at 1pm; both events are free and in the Waterhall.
The Waterhall Gallery
Chamberlain Square
Birmingham
B3 3DH
Paula Rego Retrospective Exhibition
26 September 2007 until 30 December 2007
Reina Sofia Museum of Art
Madrid
Paula Rego is one of the leading figurative painters working today, producing a richly imaginative art rooted in her own experience and memories, in her dark fantasies, in literature and art history and not least in direct observation. Born in Portugal in 1935, she travelled to England in the early 1950s to study at the Slade School of Fine Art and has made London her main home ever since. The retrospective planned for the Reina Sofía, which is being curated by the London-based art historian and independent curator Marco Livingstone, will be by far the largest and most comprehensive museum show ever held of Rego’s work. The most recent museum exhibitions have either featured specific groups of new paintings, as in the case of Paula Rego: The Sins of Father Amaro (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 1998 and Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, 1999) and Paula Rego: Celestina’s House (at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, in 1999), or have covered only the later work (as in the very impressive survey of over 150 works held at the Museu Serralves in Oporto in 2004) or work in one medium alone (as in the complete retrospective of her prints that began touring the UK in 2005). The last full retrospectives took place as long ago as 1997, at Tate Liverpool and the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon. With more than fifty years of work now behind her, and with another decade of what is perhaps her most compelling art having followed that last retrospective, the time is ripe for a complete reassessment of Rego’s work in all media – paintings, prints, collages and drawings – seen in force in such a way that their interrelationships and evolution can be fully explored.The exhibition will feature approximately 80 paintings (including the monumental pastels that have been Rego’s prime medium since 1994), 60 etchings and lithographs from her prolific production of over 200 editioned prints, and 60 drawings (many of which are studies for paintings and prints, shedding much light on the process by which she arrives at a final resolution in painting). With an artist so relentlessly inventive, who has persistently used her art as a journey through the mind and through the complexity of life’s experiences, and who has continued to work at such an intense and energetic pace, only an exhibition of this scale and breadth can do justice and fully immerse the visitor in the vision of life – in all its poignant, tragicomic turbulence – that she has steadfastly created. Searingly honest and always true to the specificity of her own experience of the world – drawing on memories of her solitary but magical childhood in Portugal and on the many roles she has assumed in her later life (including lover, wife and mother) – she has created an intensely affecting and human art specifically because she has never claimed to speak for anyone other than herself. Though celebrated by feminists including Germaine Greer for the way she has given voice to female experience, she would not claim to speak for all women nor, indeed, just for women. Repeatedly probing the psychological ramifications of the rites of passage to which we are all subject, from birth to death, she is rare among modern painters in placing life itself at the centre of her art. Oblivious to passing fashions, it was only after the age of fifty that she began to be recognised as a great artist whose forebears, such as Goya and Hogarth (to both of whom she has made reference), likewise concentrated on revealing both the best and the worst of what we as human beings are capable.
This exhibition will provide a unique opportunity to study in depth the high points of Rego’s evolution as an artist, with important groups of works from every phase. The exhibition will begin with a Life Painting made as a Slade student in 1954 through to the freely painted, almost stream-of-consciousness political paintings and collages of the 1950s and early 1960s, fuelled by anger at the Salazar regime. Bypassing the works of the later 1960s and 1970s – a period when she was raising her children, grieving over the death of her beloved father and prioritising the care of her increasingly ill husband, the painter Victor Willng – the story picks up again in the early 1980s with large, fluently executed pictures painted in acrylic on paper such as Red Monkey Beats the Wife 1981, in which animals redolent of fairy tales re-enact human dramas
that are by turns uproariously funny and deeply distressing. The major shift that occurred in her art in 1986 with an untitled sequence of ‘Girl and Dog’ pictures will be highlighted both by examples from that series and by the major paintings that followed, such as The Maids 1987 (inspired by the Genet play), The Policeman’s Daughter 1987 and The Family 1988, all of which were key works in establishing her reputation. The final and most haunting section of the exhibition will feature the large pastels for which is she now perhaps best known, beginning with the Dog Woman series and also including her much loved Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ 1995, works from The Sins of Father Amaro sequence of 1997-8, examples of her Abortion series of 1998-99, and major works from 2000-2003 inspired by various literary sources (including Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, stories by Hans Christian Anderson and Martin McDonagh’s harrowing play The Pillowman). The final section of the exhibition will feature new paintings exhibited here for the first time.Integrated within this chronological sequence of paintings will be substantial groups of her editioned prints, which since the late 1980s have been considerable production in its own right, and a careful selection of the even more prolific drawings (many of them never previously exhibited) through which she plans her pictures and tests her visual ideas. The print series to be featured include such etchings and aquatints as the Nursery Rhymes of 1989, the Peter Pan illustrations of 1992, Pendle Witches 1996 and Children’s Crusade 1996-8, and the majestic Jane Eyre lithographs of 2001-2.A national treasure in Portugal and a star also in her adopted country, Rego is now establishing a far more international reputation. Her work always speaks with great clarity, directness and emotional power to everyone who encounters it, even to those previously unfamiliar with her name or her pictures. A consummate master of drawing, almost without equal today in her depictions of the human form, she remains a torchbearer for a painting tradition stretching back over more than five hundred years without pomposity or pretence to Old Master status. The show will be accompanied by a substantial catalogue illustrating all the selected works, with an introduction by the curator, Marco Livingstone, an interview with the artist conducted by him, and one further essays by the art historian Robert Hughes.
Paula Rego Retrospective exhibition, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 25 September - 30 December. Exhibition curated by Marco Livingstone. Catalogue with Tales to tell and Thinking about painting: a conversation with Paula Rego by Marco Livingstone and Paula Rego by Robert Hughes. Exhibition travels to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, 1 February - 25 May 2008. The Madrid catalogue will be available from Marlborough Fine Art.
Paula Rego Retrospective Exhibition
26 September 2007 until 30 December 2007
Reina Sofia Museum of Art,
Madrid
The book Paula Rego relating to this retrospective exhibition is also for sale at Marlborough Fine Art, London for £35
Daniel Quintero
24 January 2008 until 24 February 2008
Daniel Quintero
(24th January - 24th February 2008)
Retrospective Exhibition
Palacio Episcopal
Plaza del Obispo, s/n Malaga
(10am – 2pm / 6pm – 9pm)
Tel: 0034 952602722
Palacio del Obispado in conjunction with Junta de Andalucia and Unicaja.
This is the first large-scale retrospective exhibition of the work of Daniel Quintero in his home city of Malaga. Curator Jose Manuel Cabra de Luna has selected the exhibition in close collaboration with the artist and it will cover four fundamental areas spanning over thirty years of the artist’s career: Drawings & Paintings from his adolescence; Still Lifes; Portraits and new works entitled Tumbling Landscapes.
Abstract Still Lifes from the artist’s formative years will be exhibited alongside works from 1997 which fuse his early abstract style with his later interest in figurative and expressionist painting.
A large section of the exhibition will comprise fifty Portraits, including that of His Majesty the King of Spain from the Patrimonio National and various senior politicians, scientists and professors. Others are of the artist’s sons, such as Sombrero Grande and Los Hermanos Quintero and of his friends, such as the filmmaker Pedro Almodovar. Of special interest is the room dedicated to Jewish and Sephardic topics, which includes the image of an aristocratic-looking Sephardic Jew with a turban and a magnificent painting dedicated to the Jewish festival of Purim.
In the Tumbling Landscapes the artist uses his long experience of landscape painting to create unsettling and extraordinary images that combine real locations with scenes from his imagination.
Daniel Quintero (born Malaga, 1949) studied with his Grand Master Amadeo Roca until 1969 when he entered the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando (Madrid), from which he graduated with honours in 1973. He lives in Madrid and works from his studios in Brooklyn, Madrid and Hossegor (South West France).
The artist’s first solo exhibition with Marlborough Fine Art was in 1977, followed by exhibitions in 1984 and 2004. He has also exhibited at Marlborough Gallery, New York in 1980,1983, 1986 and 2004. In 1985 he exhibited at Juana Mordo Gallery, Madrid, this being his first major solo exhibition after his return to Spain. He has exhibited periodically at Marlborough Madrid (1994-1995, 1999, 2001, 2003 and 2005). Marcelino Botin Foundation, Santander, displayed an exceptional selection of his work in 2002.
Commissioned portraits include:
The King and Queen of Spain (Parliament), King Juan Carlos I (Royal Collection), former Presidents Adolfo Suarez and Calvo Sotelo (Presidential Palace) and Nobel Prize winner Severo-Ochoa (Masaveu Collection), etc.
For more information please do not hesitate to contact Marlborough Gallery (Madrid).
Telephone: (0034) 91 319 14 14/ fax (0034) 91 308 43 35.
Email: belen@galeriamarlborough.com
Or
Marlborough Fine Art (London)
Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7629 5161/ fax +44 (0) 20 76296338
Email: mfa@marlboroughfineart.com
web link to view venue:
http://www.malagaturismo.com/jsp/quever/detalle.jsp?ideqp=1186