Paula Rego and fall program

Following its summer group exhibition on the theme of tenderness, the Kestner Gesellschaft continues a search for a tender narrator, conscious homo empathicus, who practices critical intimacy and considers tenderness as a tool and “a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself” (Olga Tokarczuk).

Passion and fantasy, desire and love, empathy for the human condition as well as the drive towards the emancipation and empowerment are at the heart of the works of the female artists whose exhibitions will be unveiled on October 29—Paula Rego, Lucila Pacheco Dehne and Marinella Senatore. 

Paula Rego: There and Back Again
“I’m interested in seeing things from the underdog’s perspective. Usually that’s a female perspective”, claimed the Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego (1935–2022), Grande Dame of an uncompromising vision, a true tender narrator for our complex times of a psychological and physical anguish, and an unrivalled storyteller, heralded as a feminist icon. Her groundbreaking oeuvre tackled systems of power and control, fascism, women’s rights, abortion and human tragedy, giving visibility to the underrepresented, fighting political injustices, and at the same time, redefining painterly traditions. The themes of violence, poverty, political tyranny, gender discrimination, and grief were in the centre of her challenging work. Courageously questioning the political myths and subtly although with a brutal honesty and dignity investigating human relationships, Paula Rego’s art—remains more relevant than ever as an evidence of resilience and an unparalleled subversive and rebellious strength.

Paula Rego. There and Back Again is the first institutional solo exhibition of Paula Rego in Germany, and comprises over 80 art works (paintings, drawings, prints, as well as costumes). Its title is borrowed from the ballet Pra lá e pra sá (There and Back Again) which the English composer Louisa Lasdun composed in 1998. The ballet, presented in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, was inspired by her seeing Paula Rego’s Nursery Rhymes prints, and for which Rego designed the costumes.

The exhibition Paula Rego. There and Back Again has been conceived as an opera on human condition, staged in a sequence of acts, and dramatised across a polylogue of narratives: from a Prelude (The Rehearsal Room) through Act 1 (Role-Playing and Storytelling), Act 2 (Confronting the Human Condition) and Act 3 (Battles. The Triumph of the Underdog) down to Finale (There and Back Again), featuring Rego’s masterful Angel, 1989. The exhibition is centred around Rego’s 1990 monumental masterpiece Crivelli’s Garden, a powerful anti-patriarchal statement of an art historical revision, never seen before outside of its place of origin, the National Gallery London.

Paula Rego: Theatrum Mundi
Paula Rego. Theatrum Mundi is the first ever attempt at fully reconstructing Paula Rego’s studio. As such, it offers a unique insight into the artist’s creative process of working and thinking, inviting us on a journey into a transgressive and grotesque world of theatrical imagination, and celebrating Rego’s unparalleled versatility and the magic of her storytelling. Divided into two spaces, the quiet room (rest and thinking) and the busy room (work and action), the studio had been carefully and tenderly reconstructed by Lila Nunes, who has been Rego’s most important and longstanding creative friend, and a sitter who frequently posed for several significant works, including Angel and the Ostrich series, on view in the exhibition. This is a consummate story factory, resembling a theatre backstage and a rehearsal room, a microcosm fuelled by almost every kind of narrative fodder, from Portuguese folklore to political satire and childhood memory. 

Lucila Pacheco Dehne: To All My Roaring Bodies, The Seeds And The Mountains
With Lucila Pacheco Dehne’s exhibition, the Kestner Gesellschaft is initiating a new cycle in its program under the title Future Scenarios, focused on the most recent art production by younger, upcoming artists, the “new contemporaries” from the local scene. It is a nomadic and parasitic format of an ephemeral nature, which reacts to the architecture of the Kestner Gesellschaft and pursues a strategy of unexpected appearance andrupture as a modus operandi.

Pacheco Dehne (*1994, Berlin; lives and works in Hannover) creates an unreal and surrealistic scene in which the certainties of the known world are shifted. To All My Roaring Bodies, The Seeds And The Mountains is the first exhibition to occupy the space on the way to the kitchen. The artist investigates the lost meaning of the site and explores the potential of cooking as a cultural practice that, at its core, harbours a resistive force. Pacheco Dehne opens a dialogue about how cooking and eating together create new identities, and how feminist anger makes use of cultural technique. Here the kitchen distributes its power into the world as a cell of resistance.

Marinella Senatore: Remember The First Time You Saw Your Name
For Marinella Senatore (born 1977 in Cava de’ Tirreni, Italy), art is a horizontal platform on which different but equal actors form an energetic, unified movement and thus a collective narrative. The ongoing dialogue between cultural history, pop culture, and social structures is at the heart of the artist’s community-based, participatory projects.

Kestner Gesellschaft presents one of Senatore’s light sculptures on its façade: Remember the First Time You Saw Your Name (2020), inspired by the luminarie of southern Italy, the elaborate light architectures that traditionally adorn cities, recreating cathedrals, piazzas, and other architectural and baroque elements for public celebrations and outdoor religious festivals.

The ornamental arcs from hundreds of colorful lights draw attention to the powerful message about the transience of time and life, which begins with being given a name. Senatore explicitly deals with questions about our own identity and the feeling of individual and collective belonging, and once again emphasizes her urgent demand for empowerment, emancipation, and care.

Elizabete Balčus: Hotel Universe
The Grand Opening Concert, Saturday, October 29, 9pm

Elizabete Balčus is a Latvian musician and performance artist who creates neo-psychedelic dream pop from collaged “juxtapositions of genres” and whose appearance morphs between an eccentric, diva-like ghost figure and postmodern digital animation. Her Hotel Universe is a textured soundscape of electro pop beats and siren-like vocal harmonies, sculptural flutes, and synthesisers played with fruits and vegetables.