Paula Rego and Portugal: A lecture by Ana Gabriela Macedo
Zoom lecture
25 August 2025
6.30-7.30 pm BST
“Portuguese from Camden town. […] Portuguese from tip to toe”
(Alberto de Lacerda, Fragments of a poem entitled PAULA REGO, 1965)
‘This is how I always work – drawing on my own life and dreams and feelings [...]. Interweaving is like knitting’ (Rego apud McEwen, 1997 [1992], p. 125).
One of the features of Paula Rego’s work that most fascinates me, is its deliberate exposure of networks, cross-references and, in her own words, ‘interweavings’. With some distance now, I understand that my passion for this trace in Rego’s art is also a reflection of my own personality and trajectory, as largely one’s critical endeavour and
biography are, if not mirror images, impossible to tell apart from each other. Thus, I dare to follow some of my own interweavings in this paper, as I pursue Paula’s.
Moreover, in the process of the research I developed over the years on Rego’s work and its ‘interweaving’ with other art forms, namely the pervasive link with literature, I believe it is yet to be designed the full mapping of her affinities, both aesthetic and emotional, with the Portuguese artists, painters and writers, and largely with the Portuguese culture, history and politics which she so adamantly inscribes in her art. I will try to interrelate both topics in my talk.
Ana Gabriela Macedo – Professor, English Dept., Universidade do Minho, Portugal; PH.D. University of Sussex, U.K., (1990). Director of the PHD Program in Comparative Modernities. Literatures, Arts and Cultures. Research areas: Comparative Literature; Feminist and Gender Studies; Visual Poetics.
Dr Macedo has published extensively on the works of Paula Rego adding much to the library of the artist. A selection of recent related publications include:
"Arts and Dictatorship in the Portuguese speaking context. Tensions, disputes and post-memory heritage"
"Through the Looking-Glass: Paula Rego's Visual Rhetoric, an ‘aesthetics of danger' in Textual Practice”;
"Paula Rego's Sabotage of Tradition: "Visions of Femininity". In Luso-Brazilian Review 45/1, 2008 (164-174), https://www.jstor.org/stable/30219063;
"Visual and Literary narratives of dissent. Unframing Women and Representation". In Journal of Romance Studies, vol 15, issue 3, Winter 2015, 83-98. https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.2015.150307;
"The art of storytelling and the duty of the storyteller: Paula Rego and Martin McDonagh, a visual and literary dialogue". In Faces de Eva. Estudos sobre a Mulher No.48, 2022 (31-47). https://doi.org/10.34619/awgm-owob.
