BIRMINGHAM, UK.- Waterhall Gallery of Modern Art, Birmingham, presents Paula Rego: Graven Images, on view through 7 October 2007. Paula Rego has an international reputation as an artist who paints, draws and works in print. This survey exhibition of her prints and drawings represents the first time that her work has been given a major showing in Birmingham.

Born in Lisbon in 1935, she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1950s. London became her permanent residence in 1976, receiving her first solo show at a commercial gallery in 1982. The sequence of graphic images that she began to produce in 1987 with the Girl and Dog series parallels her concerns as a painter, but also shows her independent approach to the print medium and to its own long association with storytelling.

The thirty-one images in etching and aquatint that make up Nursery Rhymes are outstanding examples of Rego’s ability to disturb and transform a familiar text into something that is often dream-like and at the same time genuinely disturbing. A triptych in pastel after Hogarth becomes the jumping off point for four etchings where she takes the opportunity to extend the possible interpretation of a loveless marriage

In the 23 lithographs of Jane Eyre, Rego produces some of her strongest and most simplified images, while creating a world of imaginative readings. The psychological drama of the book is here re-interpreted through distortions of scale, cruel expressions of human relations, and stark contrasts with light and shade. This series will be exhibited alongside the subsequent expansive conté drawing Wide Sargosso Sea.

The integral relationship of drawing to Rego’s painted and graphic work and, in turn, the influence that her printmaking has had on her drawing will be explored in a rare showing of working drawings, and new large-scale drawings that are being exhibited for the first time. The further extension of Rego’s creative world into printed book form will be represented with publications from the Folio Society and Enitharmon Press. Organised with Marlborough Fine Art, London.