Jerwood Gallery shortlisted for South Bank Sky Arts Award
5th Jun 2018
Jerwood Gallery has been nominated for the South Bank Sky Arts Award Visual Arts category for their recent Paula Rego: The Boy Who Loved the Sea and Other Stories exhibition.
The Rego exhibition which ran at Jerwood Gallery from 27 October 2017 – 7 January 2018 had at its heart a body of new paintings, drawings and sculptures, inspired by a 2005 story by Hélia Correia called The Boy Who Loved the Sea. Narrative and storytelling ran throughout the exhibition with works also inspired by nursery rhymes, thematically playful and darkly humorous across most of Rego’s work.
The exhibition also included never before seen, deeply personal, works named The Depression Series which Rego made for therapeutic reasons in 2007 and were never meant for exhibition. At the time, Rego was suffering from an especially bad period of depression and she turned to drawing as an attempt to understand or cope with it. When the drawings were finished, they were stored away unshown, until incorporated into the 2017 exhibition at Jerwood Gallery.
The Rego exhibition was made possible through a crowdfunding campaign in partnership with ArtFund and was a first for Jerwood Gallery. A popular exhibition – even before it opened the public campaigned and supported the opportunity for Rego’s work to come to Hastings.
Image: Paula Rego: The Boy Who Loved the Sea and Other Stories at Jerwood Gallery, photo: Pete Jones