Paula Rego

Portuguese painter (1935), she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, in 1952. She got a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to research on children’s tales, in 1975, and she had eleven artworks at the exhibition “Arte Portuguesa desde 1910” (1978), dominated by collages. She then came back to painting, freer and more direct, portraying the intimate and childish world, inspired in real and imagined data.  Her work took a radical turn with the series “da menina e do cão”. Technically the figures gained volume, the space gained solidity and autonomy, the set design perspective was assembled. In 1994 she executed the series of pastel paintings named Mulher Cão, which marked the beginning of a new cycle of symbolic women. Between 1997 and 1999, she used her artworks to impose her civic conscience in the series Aborto, in a critique to the result of the first referendum on that matter, carried out in Portugal in 1997. She was awarded several Honoris Causa doctorate degrees in Letters by several universities in the United Kingdom. The Casa das Histórias Paula Rego was opened in 2009, with the intent to shelter and promote the dissemination and study of her work.

www.casadashistoriaspaularego.com/pt