Paula Rego is an extraordinary work of art for 70 years, suggesting an eerie story that could be menacing, anxious, playful, or all at once, but details to the viewer. Her painting, which she advises to do, died on Wednesday at her home in northern London. She was 87 years old.
Victoria Miro Gallery, representing her Post news of her death On that website, she called her an “artist of uncompromising vision” and “brought deep psychological insight and imagination into the metaphorical art genre.” The cause is not shown.
Mr. Lego is particularly active in works that address women’s plight and perspectives, such as the “Women in Dogs” series that began in 1994, the “Abduction” series in 1998 and 1999, and the “Female Genital Resection” in 2008 and 2009. Was known. ..
Her art was highly regarded by museums and popular with collectors. In 2015, her painting “Cadets and His Sister” was sold at Sotheby’s in London for £ 1.1 million, or about $ 1.6 million.
Born in Portugal last year and living in the UK for a lifetime, Lego was the subject of a large retrospective exhibition at Tate Britain in London, including more than 100 paintings and prints.
“Each one is subtly disturbing before the reason is clear,” Michael Prodger wrote in a New Statesman review. “Recent exhibitions are so engrossing that it’s hard to imagine crouching with some malicious sensation on your shoulders.”
The exhibition’s work includes “Character Cast from Snow White” (1996), a menagerie of dissonant figures, including Snow White himself, rendered with a nervous adult face and a chunky calf. rice field.
“This is a review of the New York Times show, where Elena Nairn writes,” Painting from the imaginative depths of the evil national treasure with the destructive edges of a fresh, modern parable. “
Maria Paula Paiba de Figueiroa Lego is an electronics engineer with Maria de San Jose Avanti Quaresma Paiba, who studied painting at the Lisbon School of Art in Lisbon on January 26, 1935. Born in Jose Fernandez Figueiroa Lego.
She was born in the early days of the dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, a government that oppressed women.
“It was a fascist nation for everyone,” Lego told The Associated Press in 2004. “But it was especially difficult for women. They made a raw deal.”
She grew up in the seaside town of Estoril, and when she was a teenager, she was already aware of the struggle of women in Portugal. Her first work on her Tate Show, called “Cross-examination” when she was 15, was desperately headed by a man who was vaguely threatening to look only from her waist down. It depicts a seated woman holding a cross-examination.
When she was 17, she told AP that her candid liberal father gave her advice. This is not a country for women. “
In 1952 she began studying at the Slade Art School in London. There she stayed for the next four years, and in 1959 she met her married fellow artist Victor Willing.
Lego and her husband lived in Portugal when they first got married, but eventually settled in England, but Portugal and its political and social situation continue to be reflected in her paintings. I did. Regarding her childhood in Portugal, she once said: There are quite a lot. One of her abstract works, frequently quoted since 1960, is called “Salazar Vomiting Hometown”.
Willing died in 1988. By then, Mr. Lego’s career had begun to take off. She held her first solo exhibition in Portugal in 1965, but she received a lot of attention in the UK by holding her solo exhibition at the Air Gallery in London in 1981. The 1988 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London cemented her position as a major artist.
Her work was full of images inspired by children’s stories, the animal world, myths, and her family and marriage.
“My painting is a story,” she told the London Independent in 1991. “But they are not stories in that there is no past and no future.”
Those numbers can be scary or threatening. In many cases, it was up to the viewer to decide. For example, her 1998 work “Angel” depicts a woman holding a sponge in one hand and a sword in the other. Does she offer cleansing or a disembowelment?
Her “Dog Women” series, 14 pastel exhibited in 1994, introduces a woman in a dog-like pose — a growl, sleep, and standing watch. Her “abortion” series in late 2010 was a response to the failure of a referendum to legalize abortion in Portugal.
Godfrey Barker wrote in London’s Evening Standard when the “Abortion” series was exhibited in Madrid in 1999. “The canvas reveals the grotesque aftermath of an aborted woman. She is seen in a dozen attitudes of numb despair and distrust after the intervention of a surgeon, and the aborted life is casually in a bucket. It exists inside.
“The support cast is sketched from a tough night’s seducer to all midwives in appearance,” he added. What Paula Rego has done so far is unmatched in these photographs in terms of power, solemnity, psychological horror, and skillful modeling of paint. “
She survives with three children, Nick, Cass, Victoria Willing, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In 2009, a museum was opened in Cascais, western Lisbon, to showcase her work and her husband’s work, but Lego didn’t want to call it a museum. Instead, it’s the Casadas Historic — Story House.