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Paula Rego

Paula Rego

Paula Rego, was one of Portugal's most famous contemporary painters and printmakers known for her storybook imagery given a sinister and often sexual twist.

Paula Figueiroa Rego, was born into a wealthy Portuguese family in Lisbon during the time of Salazar's dictatorship. Paula began painting as a young child and attended the Slade School of art in London, where she met her future husband, Victor Willing, with whom she was to have three children. Willing would later develop multiple sclerosis.

Rego's first solo exhibition was held in Lisbon in 1965, but it would be years before her work reached a wider audience. During the 1950's and early 1960's Rego lived with her family in Ericeira, later dividing her time between England and Portugal before settling in England permanently in 1976.

Rego is a superb story-teller and her work can be described as feminist, allegorical and disturbing concerned with ambiguity and sexual tension.

Rego herself describes her painting as a "journey through the mind and through the complexity of life's experiences."

Rego has been a prolific painter over her career. Her most famous works include The Family (1988) a deliberately ambiguous work, which depicts a businessman in a suit (perhaps her husband) being affectionately greeted, dressed or undressed by his wife and daughter or tortured by the same. Willing, in fact, developed multiple sclerosis and had became gradually immobile before his death in 1988, the year of the painting. The Dog Woman series of paintings of the 1990's depict women as dog-like figures on all fours or baying at the moon. The Maids (1987) is a reworking of Jean Genet's play, where two servants murder the lady of the house and her daughter. The Policeman's Daughter (1987) shows a young woman polishing the jackboot of her father. "It is a painting of compromise, corruption and the squalor of power," according to the Guardian's art critic, Jonathan Jones.

Casa das Historias Paula Rego, Cascais, Portugal.
Casa das Historias Paula Rego, Cascais, Portugal
Painting by Paula Rego, Porto, Portugal.
Painting by Paula Rego, Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal

Rego's painting of Germaine Greer hangs in the National Gallery in London (where she was the second artist-in-residence) and many of her works are on display at the Saatchi Gallery in London and the Centro de Arte Moderna (part of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) in Lisbon. Her work has been exhibited at the Tate Liverpool in 1997, Tate Britain in 2005, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2007.

Born in 1935 in Lisbon, she died aged 87 at her home in north London. She was made a made a Dame of the British Empire in 2010 and awarded the Portuguese government's Medal of Cultural Merit in 2019.

Further Reading on Paula Rego

Casa das Historias Paula Rego
Paula Rego at the Saatchi Gallery




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