Feminist artist of ‘extraordinary imaginary power’

Dame Paula Rego, the renowned Portuguese-british artist, has died aged 87.

Over a career spanning more than five decades, Dame Paula created magical pictures based on her childhood memories and fairytales, with her works selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds.

They have featured in collections owned by famous names like Charles Saatchi and Madonna.

Born in 1935 in Lisbon into a prosperous family, Dame Paula was sent to an English finishing school as a teenager in Kent.

Her talent for art was spotted and she studied at London’s prestigious Slade School of Fine Art.

The artist first came to prominence in Portugal with semi-abstract work that dealt with violent or political subjects.

She gained further recognition after exhibiting with the London Group in the 1960s alongside artists such as David Hockney.

Her later pieces drew on the folk stories from her homeland and popular children’s tales like Little Red Riding Hood, but she also used her own experiences, real and imagined, of her upbringing filled with neat little girls, maids and grandmothers but with a sexual or violent subtext.

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.

Dame Paula described herself as a feminist artist, credited with revolutionising the way women are represented.

Subjects like sex trafficking and honour killings also provided material for her pieces.

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 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.

The director of Tate, Maria Balshaw, spoke of the institution’s sadness, describing Dame Paula as an “incredibly important figure”.

Ms Balshaw said: “She was an uncompromising artist of extraordinary imaginative power, who uniquely revolutionised the way in which women’s lives and stories are represented.

“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.

“For many, many women, including myself and countless colleagues at Tate, she was the greatest of trailblazers and a vivid personal inspiration.”

In 2017, the BBC broadcast a documentary, Paula Rego: Secrets And Stories, directed by Rego’s son Nick Willing, which provided a unique insight into the artist’s life and work.

She was made a Dame Commander by the Queen in 2010 at Buckingham Palace.

The artist received numerous honorary doctorates including from Oxford and Cambridge and from the Rhode Island School of Design in the US.

TRAILBLAZER: Dame Paula Rego was an inspiration.