Three and a half years after her death, Paula Rego’s work continues to unfold an uneasy power, resistant to domestication. A recent exhibition at Cristea Roberts Gallery in London brings together a group of prints produced between 2005 and 2007, during the final phase of the artist’s career. Far from any pacifying reading, these works confirm that time does not soften the strangeness of her universe; on the contrary, it sharpens it, making it harder to evade.

The images condense many of the central concerns that defined her practice: subjugated bodies, relations of power, symbolic violence, and unsettling domestic scenes. Adult women cradle fetuses like dolls; men appear with animals replacing parts of their bodies; girls play around fallen male figures whose condition—alive or dead—remains deliberately ambiguous. Across this body of work, Rego combines a direct figurative language with extreme situations, at times grotesque, at times cruel, where narrative does not lead to explanation but to a sustained state of unease. Some works enter into dialogue with the dark, theatrical imagination of filmmaker Martin McDonagh, reinforcing an atmosphere of absurdity and latent violence.