LONDON.- This Autumn 2025, Cristea Roberts Gallery presents a major exhibition featuring a body of work by Paula Rego (1935 -2022) centred around an intensely personal period of three years that the artist spent in her studio, focusing on her drawing practice, as she explored darker and more complex themes than ever before.

A major catalyst for the work she made during this period was the connection she found in the work of playwright and film maker Martin McDonagh (b. 1970), through his play The Pillowman and a series of unpublished short stories which McDonagh personally shared with Rego. The playwright’s stories became a channel for Rego to feed her own personal history, bringing to bear her childhood memories and an inner world filled with contradictions, conflict and personal crises.

Over thirty works, made from 2005 to 2007, will be exhibited, including several which will be shown for the first time. Rego’s studio will be partly recreated in the exhibition, showcasing the dolls and creatures she made and used as models for many of the works. The exhibition will be accompanied by a new book, featuring a selection of short stories by McDonagh.

In 2003 Rego saw The Pillowman, a play by McDonagh at the National Theatre, London. The experience became a touchstone for Rego, who described what she had witnessed as “something I have known all my life.” She made a monumental triptych of the same name, now housed in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. Considered by Rego to be one of her most important, accomplished artworks, this decisive moment triggered a new direction for Rego.

Following this, the artist and playwright began to correspond about producing a book of children’s stories together.

The project was never realised but Rego drew upon short stories sent to her by McDonagh, evolving and adapting his tales to create the works seen in the exhibition, including Shakespeare’s Room, 2005; Scarecrow, 2006; Turtlehands, 2006; and Girl with a Foetus, 2006.

Just as Rego several decades before, distorted and updated the classic tales of Peter Pan, Jack and Jill and Humpty Dumpty, the dark, sometimes grotesque, violent, and often tender stories by McDonagh saw her embrace narratives that she layered with memories from her childhood in Portugal and later adult life. For the first time she began to make objects, dolls and creatures, described as ‘bonecos’ by Rego, to draw from.

Shakespeare’s Room, 2006, a triptych, takes its subject matter from McDonagh’s short story The Shakespeare Room. Rego casts herself as the protagonist of the story, which is based on an early twentieth-century mathematical theory that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will almost certainly type any given text, including the complete works of Shakespeare. McDonagh use this theorem to set the scene for his story, which is played out in Rego’s prints.

Girl with a Foetus and Girl with Basin, 2006 were not unusual subject matter for Rego. The works explore a story by McDonagh about a girl who feels guilty about having an abortion. Rego, an activist in the fight for the legalisation of abortion in Portugal several years before, always maintained that abortion was something women should not feel guilty about; it was their right. McDonagh’s story triggered in the artist, now aged 70 years, a visceral response, a licence to explore her own memories and experiences. Rego uses a model to make Girl with a Foetus, 2006, but chose to depict herself at a young age in Girl with Basin, 2006. These works are visions of the cruelty imposed on women by making abortion illegal.

Rego, who often described only understanding ideas in terms of human relationships, found kinship in McDonagh’s work. In 2005 she described his stories;

“They are very, very, very gruesome and very, very beautiful at the same time and full of the most extraordinary imagination and possibilities. The images are astounding. You wouldn’t think that something so natural could come out like that. It’s not like a writer like Kafka, who is tormented. This seems to him to be like breathing. Extraordinary.”

Pigs which appear several times across Rego’s work were her favourite animal, reminding her of the pig her grandparents kept when she was young girl. In Scarecrow, 2006, Rego illustrates a story by McDonagh but sets it in the farm where she grew up in Portugal, and includes an additional character, a young girl asleep in a field. In this story a pig, not grasping that a scarecrow is an inanimate object rather than the reincarnation of Jesus, saves it from a burning field. After showing such care, the pig fails to understand why the scarecrow does not reciprocate his love and save him from the slaughterhouse.

The recreated studio will be brought to life by the figures and creatures in these works and others, such as a crucified scarecrow, a pig’s head, a foetus in a yellow sink, a skeleton with a flower in her hair, and a rabbit drawing. Paula Rego: Drawing from Life is the final time Rego’s studio will be relocated and displayed.

This exhibition is a collaboration between The Estate of Paula Rego and Cristea Roberts Gallery.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, who recently acquired a complete set of Rego’s Untitled abortion etchings, will stage a major exhibition of the artist’s paintings and prints in 2028, the first of its kind in the US.