Paula Rego

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.

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.

Her approach to figuration was influenced by Surrealism and Magical Realism while containing a storybook quality inspired by fairytales and folklore.

Among Rego’s most well-known works are “ Dog Woman” (1994) — a pastel on canvas that shows a woman crouched on the floor letting out a primal gnarl, inspired by a fairytale about an old single woman who begins to eat her pets one by one — and a series of paintings that portray women suffering the aftermath of illegal abortions. In adolescence, Rego moved to the United Kingdom at her parents’ encouragement following conservative and nationalist dictator António de Oliveira Salazar’s ascent to power in Portugal. She enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art in London, transporting herself right to the center of a burgeoning art scene retrospectively termed the School of London, populated by such figures as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and David Hockney. While there, she won the Slade Summer Composition prize for her 1954 painting “ Under Milk Wood,” which drew inspiration from her childhood memories of Portuguese women gossipping in kitchens. AIR Gallery mounted Rego’s first major solo exhibition in London in 1981. While studying at the Slade, she met Victor Willing, a fellow painter whom she would later marry. I wouldn’t have been an artist, you see?” Born in 1935, Rego drew as a child to “entertain herself,” and by the age of eight, she had resolved to be an artist.

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

I couldn’t keep following the rules; I had to break out”. In 1965, her first solo show in Lisbon was praised for its startling freedom of expression. Of her more political and eloquently shocking work, the harrowing abortion series depicts women doubled over after having had an illegal abortion. In 2010, she was made Dame by the Queen and described the honour as a “ great recognition”. Having studied at the Slade School of Fine Art at 17 under Lucian Freud, Rego met the artist Victor Willing, who later became her husband. But it was not until 1987 that Rego had her first major exhibition in Britain. Later sent to England, Rego said her parents “gave me everything”.

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 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.

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.