Paula Rego's largest drawing exhibition curated by son Nick Willing at Victoria Miro London

Victoria Miro in London presents the most extensive exhibition of Paula Rego's drawings ever assembled, spanning from the 1950s to her death in 2022. Curated by her son Nick Willing, the show reveals works on paper that demonstrate an intuitive quality absent from her paintings. The exhibition includes a childhood sketch from when Rego was nine, depicting her grandmother absorbed in an activity with hair pinned back, wearing dangly earrings and thick-rimmed glasses on a chain. This early work already displayed the artist's meticulous practice—she signed and dated it with neat script emerging from her grandmother's shoe. Rego's drawings explore narratives of female oppression through mischievous, moving, and troubled tales executed in pencil, pastel, pen, and ink. Born in Portugal, the artist settled in Britain during the 1950s, the period from which the earliest works in this exhibition originate. The collection showcases her technical range across seven decades of artistic production.