In 2010, she was made a dame<\/a> \u2013 an indication of just how influential her work had become in Britain. It\u2019s through the work she produced over a lifetime that the exhibition\u2019s title begins to take on its full meaning. Story Line might sound descriptive, but it is something more: a method. It tells visitors how Rego worked and how we are meant to look.<\/p>\n Rego is often seen as an artist of stories, with drawing as her medium. But the exhibition \u2013 and the book of the same title<\/a> This is the central insight of the exhibition at Victoria Miro. Bringing together what is described as the most comprehensive display of Rego\u2019s drawings to date, it reveals her first and foremost identity as a \u201cdrawrer\u201d (her own word), someone who thinks with the hand. <\/p>\n From early childhood sketches to late works made as a grandmother, the show traces a life in which drawing was foundational. <\/p>\n Walking through the gallery, this becomes immediately clear. The walls are filled with works on paper in graphite and ink, many of them small in scale. Some have never been shown before; others relate to larger paintings (though not always in any straightforward way). <\/p>\n What visitors see, above all, are spaces where meaning is being negotiated. A figure appears, shifts, repeats. A gesture is tried out, then pushed further. The line is exploratory. It expresses a tension at the heart of Rego\u2019s practice: between narrative and form; between what is told and how it is drawn. And because it is a line \u2013 fragile, searching, sometimes tentative \u2013 the story remains open and unsettled.<\/p>\n That openness is particularly evident in the recurring scenes of women and girls that populate the exhibition. In one drawing, a figure kneels beside another in what might be care or coercion. In another, bodies gather in ambiguous domestic spaces, their relationships unclear. These are not images that resolve easily. Instead, they hover between tenderness and violence, intimacy and control.<\/p>\n \n Such ambiguity has long been recognised as central to Rego\u2019s work. But here, stripped of the scale and theatricality of her large pastels, it feels more immediate. You see the hesitation in the line, the moment where an image might have gone another way. The \u201cstory\u201d is in motion.<\/p>\n The exhibition also situates these drawings within a broader historical and social framework. Rego\u2019s work repeatedly returns to questions of patriarchal, domestic and institutional power, but often through scenes that appear deceptively ordinary. <\/p>\n Drawing on sources as varied as fairy tales, theatre and personal memory, she constructs images in which roles are unstable and authority is constantly negotiated. In works such as her studies for The Maids<\/a> (1987), the dynamics of obedience and rebellion unfold within familiar domestic settings, where control is never secure and identity feels performative.<\/p>\n Yet what Story Line reveals is that even these politically charged works are rooted in the same process of drawing as thinking. The line works through the problem, be it ethical, emotional or bodily, before it becomes an image we recognise. The vitrines containing sketchbooks make this process especially visible. Pages filled with repeated figures, shifting poses and tentative marks show how Rego\u2019s images evolve.<\/p>\n In a cultural moment that often demands clarity of message and meaning, Rego\u2019s work offers something else. It asks us to sit with uncertainty, to accept that understanding may come slowly, or not at all. <\/p>\n As the exhibition makes clear, the power of her work lies not in what it explains, but in what it sets in motion. By the end, what stays with you is not a single image, but a way of looking. Rego\u2019s \u201cstory line\u201d is something you follow tentatively and attentively as it unfolds. <\/p>\n As Willing writes in the book that accompanies the exhibition: \u201cPaula\u2019s work can stand on its own without words or context because every picture is a very good image in itself. One can allow its mysteries to wash over us.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nthat accompanies it, written by her son Nick Willing \u2013 pushes us to read those words more carefully. The \u201cstory\u201d is something that happens in the line. In an interview with The White Review<\/a> in 2011, Rego. said, \u201cwhen you write your story \u2026 invention comes when you do a drawing\u201d. The story, in her case, emerges through the drawing, rather than preceding it.<\/p>\nInside the exhibition<\/h2>\n
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\n Read more:
\n Paula Rego: why the Portuguse artist\u2019s work remains relevant in the fight for abortion rights<\/a>
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