The art world mourns the loss of Paula Rego
The UK-based Portuguese artist was one of the leading figures of the so-called London Group, as well as one of the stars of the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Image: Paula Rego's studio. Photo by Dinkydarcey, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
“I always need a story. Without a story, I can’t get going. Maybe the story changes in the doing of it. I might discover it isn’t what I thought or intended. But I need it to find my way. I’m always looking for new stories”.Paul Rego, interview to The Guardian, 2021
Born in Lisbon in 1935, Paula Rego emigrated to the UK as a teenager, where she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she also met her future husband, the artist Victor Willing. Rego became known on the London art scene during the 1960s, when she was part of the London Group.
Clearly influenced by Surrealism, her work shows an almost constant and passionate commitment against Fascism (with direct references to the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar) and with the defense of women's rights. On the occasion of her recent retrospective at the Tate Modern, the British gallery described Rego as "an uncompromising artist of extraordinary imaginative power, she has revolutionised the way in which women are represented".
In 2015, her painting “The Cadet and his Sister” (1988) was auctioned for over £1.1 million at Sotheby's London, still an auction record for Paula Rego. Even before the news of her death, her major retrospective at Tate Britain and her prominence at the Venice Biennale suggested that this record would soon be broken.
Paula Rego's death comes just two days after another sad news for the art world, the death of Jacques Villeglé, French artist and one of the leading figures of the Nouveau Réalisme, alongside artists such as Yves Klein and critics such as Pierre Restany.

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