Untitled [Abortion], 2000Paula Rego

Each of the etchings in the series is full of the same powerful, visceral, physical and psychological charge. What Rego communicates so vividly in draftsmanship of great skill and power is the sprawling postures of humiliation and indignity and the pain, the sense of loss, the squalor of plastic buckets. Ungainly, uncomfortably sprawled or crouching, subjected to indignity and pain, the young women are strong, courageous and defiant. Above all, in these images Rego conveys the sense of purpose, of eventual freedom, even if at a terrible price. In Rego’s words, the women are ‘triumphant’, these ‘are not pictures of victims’.