![]() ![]() Crippa says prior to this time, "there were no images for these experiences of women". The abortion series, which depicts women in the aftermath of illegal abortions, was so powerful it's been credited with influencing the public to campaign for a second referendum, in 2007, after which abortion was finally legalised in Portugal. "Rego has revolutionised the way in which women's lives and stories are given visual form," notes Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, in the Foreward to the exhibition catalogue. Women, their pleasures and pain, triumphs and trials, have been always been her focus. Rego's feminist sensibilities had been ignited since her teens, when she read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, among other texts. A love triangle between Rego, Victor and her lover is depicted in her 1981 painting Red Monkey Offers Bear a Poisoned Dove. Their relationship was stormy and complex, with infidelities on both sides. Eventually, she and Willing married and had three children, living in Ericeira on Portugal's west coast, before settling permanently in London. Her father drove all the way to London and took her back to Lisbon, stopping in Paris to buy clothes – Rego's sense of style was inherited from her glamorous mother. He was married, and when Rego became pregnant he was reluctant to leave his wife. "In fact, I would struggle to think of a significant painter, particularly in Britain, where I can't see a connection to Paula."Īt 19, while studying at the Slade in London, she met Victor Willing, and began an affair with the "handsome and charismatic" artist. ![]() "I see in the work of most female painters – particularly in artists who engage with the body – and with women's position in the world," she says. "Ĭrippa, who is curator of modern and contemporary British art at Tate Britain, believes Rego's influence has been wider and cuts deeper than is often acknowledged. "She belongs to a category of artists who are fully and consistently producing work, incredibly rare for a female artist. ![]() "Paula lived for her work," Crippa tells BBC Culture. Luckily I had nice people to look after them."Įlena Crippa, who curated the Tate retrospective with Rego and others, recounts how the artist fell in with the "big boys" – including David Hockney and Frank Auerbach – when she exhibited with the London Group in the 1960s. About her "feminine" side, she adds: "I had children and I love them and all that. ![]() In fact, I had a Robin Hood outfit," she jokes. Just as I'd wanted to be Robin Hood and not Maid Marion. I wanted to be in the big boys' club, with the great painters I admired. "Women were there to be partners and supporters for their artist husbands. So how does she see her female side? "In the 1950s, the consensus was that women couldn't be artists – the pram in the hallway and all that," she replies. Rego once described the painter in her as her "masculine side". Charming, superbly accomplished, sometimes even decorative, or apparently so – her artworks may appear innocent on the surface, but look closer and you'll likely find some underlying horror, a vicious twist to the story, as fingers are snipped off or a tail is garrotted. Rego's radical art bristles with unsettling imagery, a sense of the "beautiful grotesque", as she has put it. In Rego's realm you might meet cartoon-like people, but there's no sweet fairytale ending, more a sting in the tale. Welcome to the fabulous, imaginative world of Portuguese fine artist Paula Rego – a heady and hypnotic place of symbolism and secrets, drama and comedy, fantasy and magic. Figures with toy rabbit-heads stumble, bloodied and injured, through a surreal battlefield. A bride reclines on a bed, with her white dress raised provocatively her expression is more agony than ecstasy. A woman crouches on all fours, snarling like a dog. ![]()
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