Authority and rebellion in London exhibition

Paula Rego's 'Bride' converts a wedding dress into a symbol of constriction and vulnerability.

These days, a boat service connects Tate Britain on the north bank of the Thames with Tate Modern on the South Bank. Tate Modern gets more attention, but Tate Britain, with its incomparable collection of British works, performs a wonderful service for modern painting by hosting the Turner Prize and presenting a series of exhibitions highlighting important British artists.

Early this month the exhibition Paula Rego in Focus gave great insight into the development of this powerful figure painter.

Lisbon-born Rego came to London to study at the Slade School, where she married the English painter Victor Willing and settled in the city in 1976. Her work is much admired because of the way she explores family relationships from the point of view of femininity.

She explores the position of women in images that imply a story, to which viewers can bring their own experiences.

Her work has always borrowed from folklore and fairy tales, filling them with complex meanings dredged up from memory and the subconscious. The process and development of her work was splendidly illustrated by the exhibition at the Tate.

The first room was devoted to her early work, a combination of painting and collage often based on the oppressive political conditions in Portugal that were particularly hard on women.

These strange works were filled with little incidents attacking authoritarian power. Each part had a life of its own but they were jumbled together as a violent confusion of disharmonies and remembered tensions. These works were extraordinarily complex with a wild, Surrealist atmosphere but they were almost wilfully obscure.

By the time she reached mid-career, Rego had developed beyond these images to bold figurative paintings where the complexities lay not in the technique but in the implied relationship between the figures. They were painted on a large scale that gave them grandeur but the tension between domination and rebellion was still their most characteristic feature.

A typical work was The Policeman's Daughter, where a young woman dressed in a virginal white dress, polished her father's jackboot. The girl was obediently at work but her expression was tense.

She was at the mercy of the authority represented by the boot. What gave the work intensity was a strange light coming through the window and a watching cat.

A similar intensity pervaded a work done in 1988 called The Family, where two daughters were helping a father to take his coat off in such a way that he seemed a victim pinned on the end of a bed.

Almost rape in reverse, it said a lot about rebellion against repression. The ambivalent sexual resonance opened up a multiplicity of meanings.

The exhibition climaxed in recent work where Rego shifted to yet another technique. These were large scale paintings done in oil pastel with astringent colours and a direct tactile approach. The themes remained the same.

An appalling but compelling triptych done in 1998 referred to illegal abortion. In three paintings women were shown in something like the position of traditional nude painting - they were dressed but their bodies were suffering. The pastel technique gave them great physical presence and their agony and defiance was apparent. A black plastic bucket also took on extraordinary menace.

A similar work, Bride, converted a wedding dress into a constricting garment, both corset and strait jacket, and the brilliantly drawn veils on either side of the woman emphasised vulnerability.

The most recent painting was a three-part series called The Pillow Man showing young women as the victims of a false god represented by a huge stuffed doll.

Although the women were influenced by this vast and horrible doll, ultimately a self-assertion conferred authority on them.

In the same way, Rego's most famous triptych called The Betrothal revealed how a child-bride victim became an assertive, confident woman among the details of the wreckage of a marriage.