A suite of six works completed in pastel, Paula Rego’s Little Red Riding Hood, begins with the girl saying goodbye to her mother and heading into the forest, but quickly diverts from the traditional narrative. The character of the wolf sports outlandish gym gear. Riding Hood herself is revealed to express deep scepticism about their meeting.

The series is based on Charles Perrault’s version of the fairy tale, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge – in which the girl and the grandmother are devoured by the wolf – rather than the more famous Brothers Grimm version in which they survive after being rescued by a male protagonist. Rego reintroduces the girl’s mother, showing her prodding the sated wolf’s distended belly with a pitchfork and, having enacted her revenge, sporting a fur stole.

Writing in the Thames & Hudson monograph Paula Rego: The Art of Story, Deryn Rees Jones notes that ‘like many feminists before her, Rego is interested in the ancient and transformative power of fairytales to foreground instabilities between adults’ and children’s experience and knowledge. Rego’s desire to play with the gaps between our interpretations of ambiguous actions, and the narratives on which they seemingly depend, sees her drawn to the fairytale as a kind of ingrained history that is both shared and personal.’ It is an interest, Rees Jones notes, that can be traced to Jorge Luis Borges and runs parallel with Angela Carter: ‘Like Carter, Rego is interested in the dangerous, violent aspects of female sexuality, and its potential to disrupt binary power relations.’

About the artist

Born in 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal, Dame Paula Rego RA lives and works in London. The largest and most comprehensive retrospective of Rego’s work to date takes place at Tate Britain (7 July–24 October 2021).

Recent major solo exhibitions include Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance, curated by Catherine Lampert, which travelled from MK Gallery, Milton Keynes to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh in 2019–2020 and was on view at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin from September 2020–May 2021. Her work is in the collections of major museums including the British Museum, London, UK; National Gallery, London, UK; National Portrait Gallery, London, UK; Tate, UK and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK.