Artist of the week: Paula Rego
Paula Rego is one of our greatest living painters, said Jan Dalley in the FT. Still working at the age of 86, she is “a classic in her own lifetime”, an artist whose “quasimythologised yet psychologically acute illuminations of the human condition” opened the doors for other female artists, and gave renewed vigour to figurative art at a time when it has lost much of its prestige, compared to abstraction and conceptualism. Rego’s “fierce portrayals of life – often women’s lives” – frequently draw on her roots in her native Portugal. Since moving to Britain to study art in the early 1950s, her work has shifted from abstract to representational, with her bestknown paintings evidencing an eerie, surrealist-informed character that has been often imitated but never bettered. This summer, Tate Britain will play host to “the largest and most comprehensive” exhibition of Rego’s art to date, bringing together more than 100 paintings, drawings and collages.
Rego’s art has always explored power structures and hierarchies, said Claire Selvin on ARTnews.
Much of her early work is explicitly critical of the Portuguese dictator António Salazar, whose “Estado Novo” regime lasted from 1933 until four years after his death in 1970. Later, she tackled domestic violence and colonialism. She is also one of the few artists who can genuinely claim to have initiated fundamental political change. When Portugal narrowly rejected relaxing its strict, Salazar-era abortion laws in a 1998 referendum, the artist – who had herself undergone several terminations in her youth – channelled her fury into a series of paintings that demonstrated the measures women were forced to take when denied the right to choose. The result was a horrific sequence that depicts women in various states of physical and mental trauma after seeking out dangerous illegal backstreet abortions: crying into their sheets, writhing in agony on an operating chair and, in one particularly striking instance, staring directly out at the viewer as if in accusation. It is as far from the idealised vision of femininity so prevalent in Western art as you could imagine. Yet in spite of their misery, the women depicted retain their fundamental dignity. “They are not pictures of victims,” she said. The series gained instant notoriety in Portugal, but has also been widely credited with helping to shift attitudes towards the campaign for abortion rights, said José da Silva in The Art Newspaper. When a second referendum on the subject was held in 2007, the country voted overwhelmingly in favour of liberalising abortion laws.
“Devastating” as much of Rego’s work is, she “has a wicked sense of humour and joie de vivre”, said Hettie Judah in the I newspaper. Some of her bleakest works are shot through with dark absurdity: 2003’s War, for instance, is based on a newspaper photograph of children fleeing the carnage of the Iraq conflict. Rego replaced the children’s heads with those of rabbits. “It seemed more real to transform them into creatures,” she explained. In another notable series, she painted women in the poses of dogs, a gesture more subversive than demeaning. “In these pictures every woman’s a dog woman, not downtrodden, but powerful,” Rego has said. Such images are testament to Rego’s “extraordinary imaginative power”, said Artlyst. It is no exaggeration to state that she “has revolutionised the way in which women are represented” in art.