Artist, feminist helped change how women are depicted

PAULA REGO | 1935-2022

LONDON — Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego, who created bold, visceral works inspired by fairy tales, her homeland and her own life, has died at age 87.

The Victoria Miro Gallery, which represents Ms. Rego, said Wednesday that she died “peacefully this morning, after a short illness, at home in north London, surrounded by her family.”

Ms. Rego’s work is in the collections of the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale Center for British Art.

Her work spanned styles from naturalism to the abstract, and often included vivid, unnerving depictions of people, animals or both. Among her best-known works are the “Dog Woman” pastel drawings portraying women in a series of canine poses.

Born in Lisbon in 1935, Ms. Rego was sent to school in England and went on to study art at the Slade School in London. At the time, Portugal was governed by Antonio Salazar’s dictatorship and women were second-class citizens without the vote.

Ms. Rego said her father had told her: “Leave Portugal. This is no country for a woman.”

In the 1960s, Ms. Rego exhibited alongside rising young artists such as David Hockney as part of the London Group collective. One early painting, the semi-abstract “Salazar Vomiting the Homeland,” excoriated the dictatorship. Producing it in Portugal at the time would have landed her in jail.

Though she lived in Britain for decades, Mr. Rego’s work was infused with the colors and stories of her homeland, and drew on her childhood in conservative Portugal under the Salazar regime.

“Our infancy is always with us, isn’t it?” Ms. Rego told The Associated Press in 2014.

On the Portugal of her childhood, she said: “It was a fascist state for everyone, but it was especially hard for women. They got a raw deal.”

A feminist who helped change the way women are depicted in art, Ms. Rego challenged expectations of beauty and explored

subtexts of sex and violence in Portuguese folk tales and nursery rhymes.

PAULO DUARTE/AP Artist Paula Rego reacts during an interview next to some of her paintings at the Serralves Museum in Porto, northern Portugal, in 2004.