Paula Rego

For over six decades, Paula Rego redefined figurative painting with psychologically charged scenes drawn from folk tales, literature and lived experience. Born in Lisbon in 1935, she came of age under the shadow of Portugal’s Salazar dictatorship — a political context that profoundly shaped her worldview. Sent to a finishing school in Kent, she later enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating in 1956. It was there that she met fellow student Victor Willing, who would become both her husband and a key supporter of her work.

Rego’s early paintings fused Surrealism and collage, often confronting themes of authoritarianism and domestic constraint with biting wit. Settling permanently in London in the 1970s, she established herself among a new generation of figurative painters who resisted the dominance of abstraction. A shift in her style came in the 1980s, when she began working primarily in pastel — a medium she mastered with striking expressive force. Works from this period, such as The Maids (1987) and The Dance (1988), mark a turn toward narrative compositions that blend brutality, tenderness and allegory.

In 1990, she became the National Gallery’s first artist-in-residence, and throughout the decade gained wider recognition for her unflinching portrayals of women’s agency and suffering. This culminated in The Abortion Series (1998), a response to Portugal’s failed referendum on abortion rights. In confronting the human cost of illegal procedures, Rego challenged cultural taboos with raw immediacy and empathy.

Influenced by Hogarth, Goya and 19th-century illustration, Rego drew on a wide visual lexicon, yet her language was singular. Her art has been exhibited internationally and is held in the collections of Tate, MoMA and the Gulbenkian Museum. Appointed a Dame in 2010, Rego remained an uncompromising voice in art until her death in 2022.