The artist was recently honored at Tate Britain with a retrospective exhibition
British artist of Portuguese descent Paula Rego has died at the age of 87, the Victoria Miro Contemporary Art Gallery in London has confirmed.
“It is with immense sadness that we announce the passing of artist Paula Rego. She passed away peacefully this morning, after a short illness, at her home in north London, surrounded by her family. Our sincere thoughts are with them.”
Paula Rego was born under the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Her parents, anti-fascists and Anglophiles, wanted their daughter to live in a liberal country, and at the age of 16 they enrolled her in a girls’ school in Kent, England.
From there she went on to study painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in London (1952-1956), where she had among her classmates Victor Willing, whom she married in 1959. Rego, Willing and their children previously lived between England and Portugal. settled in London in 1972. She represented both countries at the São Paulo Biennale, Portugal in 1969 and Great Britain in 1985. In 1988 Willing died after a long illness.
In the same year, Rego’s individual exhibitions at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, at the Serralves Museum in Porto and at the Serpentine Gallery in London consolidated his position at the forefront of contemporary art. In 1990 she was appointed the first Associate Artist of the National Gallery in London.
She has been honored with numerous retrospective exhibitions, including those at Tate Liverpool in 1997, those at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2007, those at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey and those at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in 2010-2011, and that of the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 2018.
In 2009 a museum dedicated to her works was inaugurated, the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego in Cascais (Portugal). In 2017, the documentary ‘Paula Rego, Secrets and Stories’, directed by her son Nick Willing, was released, and there is currently an exhibition of the artist in the Picasso Museum in Malaga. Rego lived and worked in London.
Source: La Verdad
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