CHICHESTER.- Pallant House Gallery presents a rare opportunity to see Dame Paula Rego's preparatory drawings for her paintings, providing an insight into her remarkable draughtsmanship and the development of her ideas. The exhibition, drawn from her own studio collection and organised in association with the artist and Marlborough Fine Art, features drawings from the 1980s and 90s including studies for some of her most famous works. The exhibition will include previously unseen studies and drawings and provide a new understanding of the work of one of Britain and Portugal’s most loved figurative artists. It coincides with an exhibition of Rego's recent paintings at the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings.

Born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1935, Rego has a career that spans over half a century and since her studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, has travelled consistently between the two countries. Using folklore and fairy tales, both personally constructed and widely known, Rego’s work builds narratives of both trouble and fantasy, often leaving reality behind in favour of a religious fervour.

Judgement and despair and an underlying, sometimes sinister, sexuality preoccupy the characters in Paula Rego’s drawings from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Mostly preparatory sketches for larger works, her characterisations are by no means modest and all have been executed in a way that conjures up her final, painted compositions. Identifiable sketches include images of what eventually became her 1998 abortion series and the menacing arrangement of relatives, which would produce her seminal work, ‘The Family’.

This collection of drawings is dominated by female archetypes, from the mother to the lover, to the devout impressions of religious servitude; her depictions of female experience coupled with her personal familiarity of Jungian psychology are clearly played out across the pages of her work.

In making preliminary sketches Rego was able to experiment with the narrative of her larger works. Appropriating the form of history paintings, she
purposely sought to invoke ambiguous family relationships and ambivalent ethics on a much larger, grander scale.

The intensity of her figures in action, which exemplify her skilled draftmanship, were a result of her move in the late 1980s to working with live models. During these sittings, Rego and her muses would transform her studio into a private playroom where both model and artist negotiated their way through a game of role-playing, with the images on display in this exhibition being a direct result.

Rego's work is part of many public collections in the UK and abroad including the Arts Council, the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the Gulbenkian Foundation and Sintra Museu de Arte Moderna in Portugal. The pieces featuring in this display come from Rego’s own sketchbooks and have been selected in conjunction with the exhibition’s curators Sarah Holdaway and Simon Martin.

Pallant House Gallery has one of the most significant public collections of works by Rego’s husband Victor Willing.