Paula Rego

The Portuguese-born artist died at home in Hampstead, Camden, after a short illness.

At one point, short of money, Dame Paula turned a top floor bedroom into her studio. Our heartfelt thoughts are with them." Artist Dame Paula Rego has died at home in Hampstead at the age of 87.

Paula Rego, the acclaimed Portuguese-born British artist, has died at age 87 after a short illness, her gallery said.

She taught us how to sew, draw, put on eyeliner, and tell uncomfortable stories. The family traveled between the two countries and settled in London in 1972, where she lived and worked until her death. And a year later, she was made a Dame of the British Empire for services to the arts.

Dame Paula Rego, one of the finest UK based figurative painters of her generation, has died suddenly in London aged 87.

Often turning hierarchies on their heads, her tableaux, whether tender or tragic, considered the complexities of human experience and women’s experience in particular. She was married to the artist Victor Willing, and they were considered a powerhouse couple in the 1960s. Born in 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal, Dame Paula Rego, RA, studied at The Slade School of Fine Art from 1952 to 1956.

The artist Paula Rego, who has died aged 87, once said that she liked “to work on the edge”, and her many series of paintings and drawings, about the ...

Early in the 90s Rego became the first artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in London, and while there she carried out a commission to paint a huge mural for the restaurant in the Sainsbury wing. The infection spread to the Slade, where the 19-year-old Rego made her own version of the play in oils on canvas. Willing left his wife, joined Rego in Portugal, and in 1959 they married, and went on to have two more children. When the post-revolution Portuguese – of which Rego was one – ducked out of legalising abortion by simply not turning out to vote in the referendum, she created a series of paintings that exploded like a powder keg in her home country and in Spain. Her masterpiece in this series is the triptych of 1998 showing sordid back-street abortion parlours in rooms sparsely equipped with a bed and a plastic stacking chair, or an armchair with its cover worn into holes. Paula’s father, José, was an electrical engineer who worked for Marconi; her mother, Maria, ran the home, which had maids and a cook. One of her most famous paintings, The Policeman’s Daughter (1987), needs no interpretation: in it, a scowling young woman cleans her father’s jackboot with one hand while she shoves the other arm up inside it.

Paula Rego, who has died aged 87, was the world's greatest woman artist of the past three decades and, with Lucian Freud, continued to make figurative ...

In these figurative paintings and pastels, women are shown at various moments during and after abortions that were administered in domestic spaces. They are ...

In 1988, her work was the subject of a traveling survey that made stops at two venues in Portugal and eventually the Serpentine Gallery in London. Since the ’90s, her work has been widely exhibited throughout Europe. In 2010, Rego was made a Dame Commander, one of the highest honors bestowed on a British citizen. She liked to create uncanny studio models and was photographed sitting beside a life-size dummy that resembled herself but twisted, like a misremembering. In 1994 she paints on her landmark series, “Dog Women,” in which women posture like dogs. Women, animals, and pubescent girls populate many of Rego’s canvas, which served as tools to work through her own personal matters. Her paintings started off as semi-abstract but over the course of her career, they shed their abstract nature and became defiantly figurative, rooted in Jungian theory, where primal fears manifest with a fantastical edge.

The Portuguese-British painter renowned worldwide for her vivid and unsettling fairy-tale visions has died at the age of 87.

From the 1970s, Rego began to make art based on Portuguese folklore and fairy tales, which marked the beginning of the shift toward the vivid figurative works, frequently imagining scenes of violence and trauma meted out upon women, that would come to define her. In 1962 Rego began exhibiting with the London Group, alongside artists such as David Hockney and Frank Auerbach; her work at this time was largely abstract and Surrealist-influenced, containing veiled but strident criticisms of Salazar’s regime in Portugal. Among them were the Dog Women – in which women squat and scratch themselves like beasts – and the Abortion Paintings, which were a response to the failed Portuguese referendum to legalise abortion in 1998, and were later credited as helping to sway public opinion ahead of second, successful vote in 2007.

Born in Lisbon in 1935, Rego was sent to school in England and went on to study art at the Slade School in London. Portugal was governed by Antonio Salazar's ...

He recalled that on a visit to Rego’s London studio in 2016 he “witnessed the enchanting and disturbing power” of her work. It added that Rego “was an artist who was acutely alive to the reality of our society.” After Portugal’s transition to democracy in the 1970s, Rego became one of the country’s most famous artists. In the 1960s Rego exhibited alongside rising young artists such as David Hockney as part of the London Group collective. In 2008-2009 she created another series, “Female Genital Mutilation.” Producing it in Portugal at the time would have landed her in jail.

“She died peacefully this morning, after a short illness, at home in North London, surrounded by her family. “Our heartfelt thoughts are with them”.

She was made a Dame Commander by the Queen in 2010 at a ceremony held at Buckingham Palace, and won the Mapfre Foundation Drawing Prize in Madrid in the same year. Dame Paula was also the first artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in London and a retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Tate Britain last year. “For many, many women, including myself and countless colleagues at Tate, she was the greatest of trailblazers and a vivid personal inspiration. “Over the course of her career, she gained enormous respect from many fellow artists and art critics, leading the way in giving powerful form to denouncing injustice. Notable among her works are her Dog Woman pastel drawings, which portray women in a series of canine poses, and her portrait of Germaine Greer from 1995 which featured in the National Portrait Gallery in London. She was seen as one of the most notable figurative artists of her generation, with her work ranging from painting, pastel, and prints to sculptural installations.

The artist blazed into Portugal's 1998 abortion referendum with powerful images of women in backstreet clinics. But there is no blood, no gore – just ...

They were published in a number of Portuguese newspapers in the run-up to a second referendum on abortion in 2007. In one, a sophisticated woman in a red patterned dress leans back on a plastic sheet on the single bed, her parted legs slung awkwardly over the back of folding chairs standing in for obstetric stirrups as she waits for the surgeon. Rego pulls the focus of the abortion debate back to the woman’s experience.

The artist Paula Rego, Portuguese-born but long resident in Britain, has died today, June 8, aged 87. Her work, often informed by folk tales, frequently had ...

“I was not a good nurse,” Rego says in her interview with the White Review. “I'm not good with illness. The particular issues facing working class women, including the right to an abortion and opposition to all forms of discrimination, can be addressed only through the mobilization of the entire working class and the fight for socialism. The fight to defend the social rights of working class men and women, the right to a job, to health care, to a pension, to an education, is inseparable from a fight against social inequality, war and the capitalist system. There is barely a word about the series of paintings that included The Firemen of Alijo. Rego says that a “general decline set in for years” between 1966 and 1979, exacerbated by bouts of depression and excessive drinking. The cartoonish character of her compositions had virtually disappeared by the time Rego produced a series of extremely moving paintings as Willing approached death. 1966 was a dreadful year for Rego and Willing; both of their fathers died, and Willing was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. “My mother is really a casualty of the society she lived in. Her works responding to Portugal’s failure to legalise abortion in 1998 were informed by her own experiences, but never lost sight of the fact that this was a social question. There was a period of disorientation, driven by Willing’s ill-health and a financial crisis that saw them move to London in 1976, but Rego’s steeliness in refocusing her work through folk art prevented some of her most personal and individual works of this period from slipping into self-indulgent individualisation. She draws on her social commentating forebears—Goya, Hogarth, Courbet—and gruesome Portuguese folk tales to explore the contradictions of human existence. Her father, a liberal anti-fascist, was protected to some extent by his job, but Paula understood the violent repression of workers and impoverishment across the country.

A gallery representing the celebrated painter says she died peacefully at her home in north London.

"Of course Portugal is in her soul but she always says she's a Londoner," her son and filmmaker Nick Willing told the BBC last year. She died peacefully this morning, after a short illness, at home in North London, surrounded by her family. She taught us how to sew, draw, put on eyeliner, and tell uncomfortable stories.— Grace Smart (@Grace_Smart) In 2021, Dame Paula had a retrospective exhibition at the Tate Britain gallery in London, which described her at the time as "an uncompromising artist of extraordinary imaginative power", who "revolutionised the way in which women are represented". Our heartfelt thoughts are with them.— Victoria Miro (@victoriamiro) pic.twitter.com/hFXdIZeTtb June 8, 2022 Renowned artist Dame Paula Rego has died at the age of 87, a gallery representing her has confirmed.

Art's great storyteller has died at the age of 87. Our critic celebrates a woman of courage and freakish imagination.

The severity of his uniform is matched by the repressed formality of her clothes and the kinky objects beside her: a cathedral-shaped handbag and gloves. It is an image of oppression but also an artistic exploration of the body as a vehicle of emotion. It is a master’s exploration of the nude that consciously echoes the suffering bodies of Michelangelo’s prisoners or the classical Niobids. Does that seem a stretch? When Rego painted her tragicomic, unsettling histories of power and violence in the 1980s, there was a vogue for big, bold paintings. And before she is anything else, she is a painter who mixed the British eye for sharp reality with a sense of fantasy and theatre that reflects her Catholic heritage. And she has a distinct perspective on the games of power she paints: she is the daughter, not the policeman. Her style may match Freud’s but she had read a lot more of his grandfather Sigmund. The Cadet and his Sister (1988) is another grand monument to the unjust and the perverse. Rego is a magic realist to the letter, mixing fact and fantasy, a connoisseur of fairytales. So there is a reason the man in The Family appears so helpless: far from assailing him in a righteous gender rebellion, the Rego figure and her daughters are dressing someone with MS. In a painting you can see a sequence of events all at the same time, by glancing through the panels of a series or maybe seeing them all compressed in one canvas. We are in a Neverland of time and place, somewhere between the present day, the repressive Portugal into which Rego was born and pure imagination. The wickedness of Paula Rego’s imagination shines like patent leather in her 1987 painting The Policeman’s Daughter. A young woman is polishing, as the title tells us, her father’s jackboot.