Courageous paintings at the New Tate Britain retrospective

Since the 1950s, Paula Rego has played a key role in redefining figurative art in the UK and internationally. An uncompromising and expressive artist, she revolutionized the way women are represented. Although born in Portugal, Paula Rego has spent most of her life in London, so a full retrospective of her work to date at Tate Britain seems appropriate.

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The exhibition tells the story of the remarkable life of this artist, highlighting the personal nature of much of her work and the socio-political context in which it is rooted. Fascism, a misogynistic art world, and manic depression are among the topics covered in Paula Rego’s art. The exhibition reveals its wide range of references, from comics to history painting. Showcasing over 100 works, including fantastic and rarely seen collages, paintings, large-scale pastels, drawings and prints, the exhibition spans Rego’s early work from the 1950s to his richly layered and staged scenes. from the 2000s. Seventeen works in the exhibition, including its White as snow painting for Disney, have never been shown in the UK before.

The exhibition begins with a selection of the first rarely seen works by Rego in which the artist first explored personal and social struggles. His powerful work Examination, painted in 1950 when she was only fifteen, very early on affirmed her commitment to denounce injustices and defend victims. Paintings, collages and drawings from the 1960s to 1970s show his fierce opposition to the Portuguese dictatorship. For these pieces, she drew on a wide range of sources of inspiration, including advertisements, cartoons and reports. She also explored folk tales as representations of the human psyche and behavior, as with Brancaflor – The devil and the devil’s wife in bed 1975.

Rego gave up collage in 1980 and returned to painting, combining childhood memories with his experiences as a wife, wife and lover. The exhibition includes major paintings from this period such as pieces from the series “The Vivian Girls”, in which girls rebel against a coercive society. The important works that established Rego’s reputation when he first exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in 1988 are here, including The policeman’s daughter 1987. Many of these images relate to Rego’s relationship with her husband, painter Victor Willing, who suffered for many years from multiple sclerosis and died in 1988. One of his best-known works, Dance, located on a Portuguese beach, is intensely personal and lasted six months. Painted in the year of her husband’s death, it represents both the artist and her husband, as well as her grandmother and mother.

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Paula Rego was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1935, during the authoritarian dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Her parents were anti-fascist and Anglophiles and sent their daughter to an end-of-school school in Kent, England. She then studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art where she met another painting student Victor Willing, whom she married in 1959. After graduating, Rego and his family lived between Great Britain and Portugal and settled in London in 1972. She represented both nations at the São Paulo Biennale (the second oldest art biennale after Venice): Portugal in 1969 and Great Britain in 1985. In 1988, following the death of her husband, Paula Rego’s personal exhibitions at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Serralves Museum, Porto and Serpentine Gallery, London, cemented her reputation as a major contemporary artist. In 2009, a museum dedicated to his work, the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, opened in Cascais, Portugal. The documentary Paula Rego, Secrets and Stories, directed by his son Nick Willing, was released in 2017.

Paula Rego at Tate Britain, July 7 – October 24, 2021. Tickets £ 18 / Free for members / Concessions available.

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