Dame Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego (Portuguese: [ˈpawlɐ ˈʁeɣu]: 26 January 1935 – 8 June 2022) was a British-Portuguese visual artist, widely considered the pre-eminent woman artist of the late 20th and early 21st century, known particularly for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. Rego's style evolved from abstract towards representational, and she favoured pastels over oils for much of her career. Her work often reflects feminism, coloured by folk-themes from her native Portugal.
Rego studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and was an exhibiting member of The London Group, along with David Hockney and Frank Auerbach. In 1989 she became the second artist-in-residence, after the scheme re-started, at the National Gallery in London, after Jock McFadyen, who was the first in 1981. She lived and worked in London.
Rego was born in Lisbon, Portugal on 26 January 1935. Her father was an electrical engineer who worked for the Marconi Company and was ardently anti-fascist. Her mother was a competent artist but, as a conventional Portuguese woman from the early 20th century, gave her daughter no encouragement towards a career, even though she began drawing at age 4. The family was divided in 1936 when her father was posted to work in the United Kingdom. Rego's parents left her behind in Portugal in the care of her grandmother until 1939. Rego's grandmother was to become a significant figure in her life, as she learned from her grandmother and the family maid many of the traditional folktales that would one day make their way into her art work.
Rego's family were keen Anglophiles, and Rego was sent to the only English-language school in the Lisbon area at the time, Saint Julian's School in Carcavelos, which she attended from 1945 to 1951. St Julian's School was Anglican and this, combined with the hostility of Rego's father to the Roman Catholic Church, served to create a distance between Rego and full-blooded Roman Catholic belief, although she was nominally a Roman Catholic and lived in a devoutly Roman Catholic country. Rego described herself as having become a "sort of Catholic", but as a child she possessed a sense of Catholic guilt and a very strong belief that the Devil was real.
In 1951, Rego was sent to the United Kingdom to attend a finishing school called The Grove School, in Sevenoaks, Kent. In 1952, Rego was invited to attend the Chelsea School of Art in London, but her father José Figueiroa Rego was advised against this choice by her legal guardian in Britain, David Phillips, who had heard that a young woman had become pregnant while a student there. Phillips suggested to her parents to try another school for Rego. Phillips knew someone who worked at the Slade School of Fine Art and persuaded them to let Rego attend on a part time basis. From 1952 to 1956, she attended the Slade School. She ultimately left without collecting her diploma.
Although Rego was commissioned by her father to produce a series of large-scale murals to decorate the works' canteen at his electrical factory in 1954, while she was still a student, Rego's artistic career effectively began in early 1962, when she began exhibiting with The London Group, a long-established artists' organization, which had David Hockney and Frank Auerbach among its members. In 1965, she was selected to take part in a group show, Six Artists, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. That same year she had her first solo show at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (SNBA) in Lisbon. She was also the Portuguese representative at the 1969 São Paulo Art Biennial. Between 1971 and 1978 she had seven solo shows in Portugal, in Lisbon and Porto, and then a series of solo exhibitions in Britain, including at the AIR Gallery in London in 1981, the Arnolfiniin Bristol in 1983, and the Edward Totah Gallery in London in 1984, 1985 and 1987.
In 1988, Rego was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Serpentine Gallery in London. This led to her being invited to become the first Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London, in 1990, in what was the first of a series of artist-in-residence schemes organized by the gallery. From this emerged two sets of work. The first was a series of paintings and prints on the theme of nursery rhymes, which was taken around Britain and elsewhere by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the British Council from 1991 to 1996. The second was a series of large-scale paintings inspired by the paintings of Carlo Crivelli in the National Gallery, known as Crivelli's Garden which have been housed in the main restaurant at the gallery prior to its temporary shutting to allow for the renovation works planned to renew the Sainsbury Wing in celebration of the National Gallery's bicentenary in 2024.
In 1995, Rego used pastels to revise the story of Snow White in her drawing Swallows the Poisoned Apple. In her work, Snow White is pictured after she has eaten the poisoned apple and appears older and in some type of physical pain. She "lays clutching her skirts, as if trying to cling to life and her femininity which are slipping away". This was done to show what a female goes through during the processes of life and ageing over the years, as well as showing the "physical and psychological violation" age plays in a female's life. At the time the artwork was made, Rego was about 60 years old and her age did play a significant part in this artwork.
Other exhibitions included a retrospective at Tate Liverpool in 1997, Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1998, Tate Britain in 2005, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2007. A major retrospective of her work was held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2007, which travelled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the following year.
In 2008, Rego exhibited at the Marlborough Chelsea in New York, and staged a retrospective of her graphic works at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes, France. As well as her showing at Marlborough Fine Art in London in 2010, the art historian Marco Livingstone organised a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, Mexico, which was later shown at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil. In 2011, Rego appeared in the documentary Looking for Lowry with Ian McKellen as an interviewee, commenting on her experience with Lowry at the Slade School of Fine Art.
Rego was commissioned by the Royal Mail in 2004 to produce a set of Jane Eyre stamps.
In March 2017, Rego was the subject of the BBC documentary Paula Rego, Secrets & Stories, directed by her son Nick Willing.
Rego's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. In 2023 some of her art was exhibited at the Pera Museum in Istanbul.
At the time of her death, Rego was represented by the Victoria Miro Gallery and the Cristea Roberts Gallery. Her work can be seen in many public and private institutions around the world. There are 43 of her works in the collection of the British Council, ten works in the collection of the Arts Council of England, and 48 works at the Tate Gallery, London.
A huge embroidery by Paula Rego (250 × 650 centimeters) depicts the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, which pitted the troops of King Sebastian I of Portugal against those of the Moroccan sultan Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik in 1578. The Portuguese were crushed, their king killed, and Spain took the opportunity to invade their country. The embroidery (commissioned to decorate a hotel in the Algarve, but refused by the client) was displayed at the "Paula Rego. Jeux de pouvoir" exhibition (Kunstmuseum, St. Alban-Graben 8, Basel, until February 2, 2025).
Rego spent much of her career focusing on women's rights and abortion rights. A critic of the anti-abortion movement, she used the theme of abortion as a focal point in much of her art. Rego opposed the criminalisation of abortion and said that the anti-abortion movement "criminalises women" and in some instances will force women to find potentially deadly "backstreet solutions". She also stated that it disproportionately affected poor women, as it was easier for the rich to find a safe abortion (irrespective of the law) because they could afford to travel abroad for the procedure.