A Paula Rego Reading List by Alice Strang by IMMA Ireland published on 2020-12-15T16:14:00Z Paula Rego openly cites a wide range of literary sources that includes plays, poems and novels, as a source of inspiration for her work. We invite curatorial partner of the Paula Rego Obedience and Defiance touring exhibition, Alice Strang, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland to share her special literary interest in Rego’s work and introduce reading material to complement the exhibition – Paula Rego, Obedience and Defiance. More Details Track: A Paula Rego Reading List by Alice Strang, 10 December 2020, Recorded for IMMA Talks In this podcast listen to Strang’s insightful perspective and discover how Rego uses the literary narratives as the starting point for her own imaginative visualisations and creations. Strang introduces a selection of plays, poems and novels that includes: Honoré de Balzac, Gillette or The Unknown Masterpiece, Jean Genet, The Maids; Martin McDonagh, The Pillowman; Blake Morrison, ‘Moth’ and Eça de Queirós, The Crime of Father Amaro. By talking through these literary sources Strang makes valuable connections to Rego’s unique alchemy of interpreting an author’s vision and mining it for elements that register with Rego’s own political and personal concerns of clerical corruption, morality, systems of class and the psychological complexity of family relationships. The Rego works discussed in this podcast are featured in the top banner of this webpage. About Speaker Alice Strang is a Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Galleries of Scotland. She curated the recent landmark exhibition Modern Scottish Women: Painters and Sculptors 1885-1965, which was held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. The exhibition and its accompanying publication focused on an 80 year period during which an unprecedented number of Scottish women trained and practised as artists, examining the lives and work of 45 painters and sculptors and the effect their gender had upon their experiences. She read History of Art at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge before joining Christie’s, where she worked as a Specialist in the Impressionist and Modern, Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Art departments. She joined the National Galleries of Scotland in 1999 and is a curator of the nation’s collection of Western art from c.1890 to the present day. Alice lectures throughout the UK and is a ‘BBC Expert Woman’, most recently contributing to two episodes of Lachlan Goudie’s BBC Scotland television series The Story of Scottish Art. Genre Learning