Obituaries / Paula Rego

 

Paula Rego in front of Dogs of Barcelona, 1965

Dame Paula Rego obituary

Michael McNay
Wenesday 8 June 2022

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 subjugation of women, abortion and the marriage market, cut across social perceptions of the role of women, and disrupted the male view of women and their sexuality.

 

Paula Rego

Artist Paula Rego, known for her visceral and unsettling work, dies aged 87

‘She could make anything part of a story’ / What Paula Rego chose to paint and why

Paula Rego, la reconocida artista portuguesa, falleció a sus 87 años

Celebrated Portuguese-born British artist died peacefully after short illness, says Victoria Miro gallery

Geneva Abdul and Ashifa Kassam
Wed 8 Jun 2022 15.53 BST

Paula Rego, the internationally celebrated Portuguese-born British artist known for her visceral and unsettling work, has died age 87.

The Victoria Miro gallery announced Rego’s death on Wednesday, saying: “She died peacefully this morning, after a short illness, at home in north London, surrounded by her family. Our heartfelt thoughts are with them.”

Most of Paula Rego’s late and best work was done in pastel, such as this piece, Love, 1995.

‘She could make anything part of a story’ – what Paula Rego chose to paint and why

However volatile her subject matter, her art never tells you what to feel, writes the Guardian’s art critic – although she could indulge in a kind of knockabout buffoonery

Adrian Searle
Thu 9 June 2022

When Paula Rego showed at the Serralves Museum in Porto in 2004, such was her fame in her native Portugal that the museum was kept open all night, and she was frequently accosted on the streets of the city with something like adulation. Fame never really affected her, and while some artists coast through their later careers, Rego continued to surprise and shock right to the end. Her work was both deeply personal and spoke of larger issues.

Top 100 women / Paula Rego

Paula Rego

Top 100 women: art, film, music and fashion

Paula Rego

Portuguese painter who broke boundaries at the Slade School of Art and was nominated for the Turner prize in her 50s

T

o look over Paula Rego's body of work is to look over the landscape of women's experience: desire, abortion, rape, female circumcision, childbirth, family relationships, dominating and being dominated by men; her masculine female figures are sometimes lonely, but usually fierce and often bent on revenge. Success came relatively late in life – a graduate of the Slade School of Art at a time when female artists were taught how to support and inspire their "superior" male artist partners ("women were good either for going to bed with or making good wives – particularly if they came with their own money and could support the men".)

Rego, now 75, was in her 40s before her first big solo exhibition, and in her 50s when she was nominated for the Turner prize. Although she was made a dame last year, Rego was born in Portugal and in 2009, Paula Rego – House of Stories, a gallery dedicated to housing her work, opened in Portugal. Germaine Greer, whose portrait by Rego hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, says, "No other artist has ever come close to capturing Rego's sense of the phantasmagoria that is female reality."

THE GUARDIAN