Richard's Art Noticeboard: Paula Rego, 1935

Paula Rego, Angel, 1988

Paula Rego died on 8 June 2022

The following appreciations were published in The Guardian on 10 June 2022: ‘Indefatigable, curious, 100% original’: female artists on Paula Rego. Read more here.

Sonia Boyce
She was such an insightful, hardworking and mischievous artist. I first came across her curious watercolours of girls doing awful things to their pets in the 1980s and have been a fan ever since. They were hilarious, surprising and wildly imaginative. Paula opened us all to the possibilities of being daring and brave in our work. There’s no one like her. What a loss.

Lubaina Himid
I never met Paula Rego although she seems to have been a part of British contemporary art for a very long time. Her paintings frighten me, their deep depictions of brutality and pain, whether speaking of fascist regimes or domestic control, are as powerful as you allow them to be.

Tacita Dean
As a student at Falmouth School of Art in the mid-1980s, I had a one-to-one tutorial with Paula Rego that I have never forgotten. I remember exactly where I was sitting, the light in the room, even the time of day is transposed in my mind’s eye with the distinctive choreographic invention of some of her most famous paintings. She had arrived on the train from London after a show at the Edward Totah Gallery and the small catalogue was feverishly being passed around with its liquid zoomorphic personages and vivid array of colours. She was immediately a powerful presence with enormous European charm and sophistication – a bit of something that came from elsewhere, but childlike, too. She made a huge impression that day and left behind a cluster of devoted students. These first encounters are important, and she will always have a special place in my personal pantheon of artists. A defiant painter who worked with the stuff of herself, she was indefatigable, courageous, single-minded, endlessly imaginative, resolutely curious and 100% original.