Paula Rego's foundlings and fairytales

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Few artists are better skilled to reflect the abuse, sex and violence that necessitated the hospital’s existence — these themes have long haunted Rego’s work.

Oratorio (2008–09), shown at the Foundling and reconstructed here, is a large cabinet on whose doors and interior are eight pastel, conté crayon and charcoal drawings — a woman being raped and another giving birth by moonlight among them. At the cabinet’s heart is a grim tableau of the papier-mâché figures that normally act as props for Rego’s drawings, dressed in Foundling Museum costumes.

It’s an arresting work but not Rego’s best — the clumpy props are more effective when transformed in the new drawings and etchings here, many of which expand on the Foundling themes. Several develop Oratorio’s nightmarish image in which three women — a large, puppet-like figure in antique clothing, a scarfed woman with dwarfism, and another based on Rego’s familiar model Lila Nunes — drop a bucket containing infants down a well.

Rego’s contemporary fairytales, a complex synthesis of autobiography, Portuguese folk stories, literary and art historical references and social commentary (here, on the horrors of female circumcision), are often unfathomable. But immediate scrutability is not Rego’s concern. As both her style and iconography loosen, she brings the viewer’s own imagination increasingly into play, and it makes her art all the richer.

Until August 20 (020 7629 5161, marlboroughfineart.com)

Paula Rego: Oratorio
Marlborough Fine Art, W1