Exhibition of the week: Paula Rego at Tate Britain

Her art mixes folklore and ‘fetishistic menace’, enchantment and horror – and it ‘lingers powerfully in the mind’

Clockwise from top left: Paula Rego’s ‘Flood’ (1996), ‘The Artist in Her Studio’ (1993) and ‘The Dance’ (1988)
Clockwise from top left: Paula Rego’s ‘Flood’ (1996), ‘The Artist in Her Studio’ (1993) and ‘The Dance’ (1988)
(Image credit: Tate/Paula Rego)

Nobody ever accused Paula Rego of holding back, said Eleanor Nairne in The New York Times. She is “the kind of artist who paints a soldier in a leopard-print gimp mask”, a woman cutting off a monkey’s tail, or “the devil’s wife in nipple tassels”. Her art mixes folklore and “fetishistic menace”, enchantment and horror – and it “lingers powerfully in the mind”.

Rego was born in Portugal in 1935, but has been largely resident in England since the 1950s: her liberal parents sent her to a finishing school in Kent and then art college in London to escape the repressive regime of dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. In her adopted home­land, though largely ignored until the 1980s, she has become an unlikely “national treasure” and Dame Commander.

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