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Lot Essay
At once arresting and comedic, School for Little Witches is a striking, sardonic work by Paula Rego. Like patrons of an absurdist nursery, Rego depicts a gaggle of children and their adult carers, each more outlandish than the last. With their masklike, skeletal faces, this is a scene plucked from another world, but the question of who is in charge—and what power dynamics govern this unruly gathering—remain unknown. Rego’s works can be uncanny, a sensation that results from both the image itself and her process: she often stages her compositions using dolls in lieu of models and regularly bases her figures on people she knows. Despite its fantastical appearance, School for Little Witches represents an act of revenge on a teacher who had terrified her as a child. ‘She taught me the times tables, and she made me feel bad about my drawing. She said: “Look at this girl, who says she wants to be a painter, and look at the rubbish she draws” … I cast nasty people as nasty characters, bullies and witches and so on. I use them in scenarios and take pleasure in their downfall. They can be skewered or hung or shown for the repellent creatures I feel they are. You can be as violent as you like in a picture’ (P. Rego interviewed by J. Rix, ‘I’m interested in seeing things from the underdog’s perspective. Usually that’s a female perspective’, Studio International, 20 June 2019).
To craft her narratives Rego draws from folktales, nursery rhymes, the cinema, the news; her paintings seem to have been born from oral tradition and rumour. Within her pantheon, animals, young girls, and women have oversized roles, and the diversity of female experience has long been central to Rego’s practice. Loss, desire, and violence are themes which recur alongside visual references ranging from the Old Masters and Balthus to Surrealism. Since the 1990s, Rego has worked primarily in pastel and Conté pencil, creating works that possess a ‘physical intensity, at once soft and rugged, that makes bodies and faces explode off the wall’ (J. Jones, ‘Paula Rego review—phenomenal paintings, shame about the décor’, The Guardian, 5 July 2021). School for Little Witches reveals Rego’s masterful use of colour in the accretions of rust orange, the swathe of pale blue, and the subtle, eloquent shifts in tonality.
Rego, who was the subject of solo exhibitions at Tate Britain and Victoria Miro last year, crafts whole universes at once unnerving and affecting. Her compelling, almost voyeuristic compositions blend memory and fantasy with real world antecedents. That her work refuses to provide an easy interpretation allows the artist to extend her reach. These are scenes which speak to the human condition. ‘There is something very subversive and liberating about her work, an obvious aspect of struggle against authority which pokes around the insides of individuals and society,’ writes César Antonio Molina Sánchez, Spain’s former Minister of Culture. ‘Her output is pervaded with an unusual intensity that reaches out to relate cogently with the spectator. The motivating force for her art is, as Marco Livingstone says, devotion to the human predicament’ (A. Sánchez, quoted in Paula Rego, exh. cat. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid 2007, p.10). Chaotic and unnerving, Rego’s School for Little Witches may offer more questions than answers but in depicting emotion in all its grotesquery, the artist embraces an understanding of humanity as generous, dangerous, primal, tremendous.
To craft her narratives Rego draws from folktales, nursery rhymes, the cinema, the news; her paintings seem to have been born from oral tradition and rumour. Within her pantheon, animals, young girls, and women have oversized roles, and the diversity of female experience has long been central to Rego’s practice. Loss, desire, and violence are themes which recur alongside visual references ranging from the Old Masters and Balthus to Surrealism. Since the 1990s, Rego has worked primarily in pastel and Conté pencil, creating works that possess a ‘physical intensity, at once soft and rugged, that makes bodies and faces explode off the wall’ (J. Jones, ‘Paula Rego review—phenomenal paintings, shame about the décor’, The Guardian, 5 July 2021). School for Little Witches reveals Rego’s masterful use of colour in the accretions of rust orange, the swathe of pale blue, and the subtle, eloquent shifts in tonality.
Rego, who was the subject of solo exhibitions at Tate Britain and Victoria Miro last year, crafts whole universes at once unnerving and affecting. Her compelling, almost voyeuristic compositions blend memory and fantasy with real world antecedents. That her work refuses to provide an easy interpretation allows the artist to extend her reach. These are scenes which speak to the human condition. ‘There is something very subversive and liberating about her work, an obvious aspect of struggle against authority which pokes around the insides of individuals and society,’ writes César Antonio Molina Sánchez, Spain’s former Minister of Culture. ‘Her output is pervaded with an unusual intensity that reaches out to relate cogently with the spectator. The motivating force for her art is, as Marco Livingstone says, devotion to the human predicament’ (A. Sánchez, quoted in Paula Rego, exh. cat. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid 2007, p.10). Chaotic and unnerving, Rego’s School for Little Witches may offer more questions than answers but in depicting emotion in all its grotesquery, the artist embraces an understanding of humanity as generous, dangerous, primal, tremendous.