Paula Rego has said more than once in her long career how lucky it is for her as a woman and artist to process all these untold stories that male-dominated art knows nothing about.

And finally, the now 87-year-old Portuguese-British painter is receiving the broad recognition she deserves beyond her home countries.

She is represented in the central pavilion at the female-dominated Venice Biennale;

Solo exhibitions from Hanover to Istanbul are being planned;

and in Málaga, southern Spain, the Paula Rego retrospective, which has been strangled by the pandemic at its stops at Tate Britain and Kunstmuseum Den Haag, is finally breathing room.

With her, the Museo Picasso is continuing a series of exhibitions honoring important female artists: After Sophie Taeuber-Arp,

Hilma af Klint, Louise Bourgeois and surrealist women are now being given space for Paula Rego in the museum dedicated to the modern matador Picasso in his native city.

She knows how to use it.

Ursula Scheer

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Curated by Elena Crippa from the Tate, the entire Rego universe opens up, in which the private, intimate and unconscious, political and social narratively come together to form unique figurative constellations and the images finally unfold a direct force that is typical of the artist's mature work is: A female "angel" from 1998 stands for it.

Life-sized in pastel chalk on paper, the radiating physical presence of the female figure with a glowing yellow skirt evokes memories of baroque depictions of saints.

But instead of humbly as a sign of martyrdom, she carries her sword raised in her right hand like an avenging angel, and in her left hand a sponge as an artistic attribute.

The composition of the physical presence aims at the face turned towards the viewer.

The retrospective spans a wide chronological arc – the youngest of the approximately seventy works in the show date from 2009, the earliest from the 1950s – and makes the development of an artist understandable, who sees herself as a fighter, whose visions for simple feminist or political interpretations always take too subversive a form.

child of a dictatorship

Born in Lisbon during Salazar's dictatorship, Paula Rego was extricated from the restrictions in authoritarian Portugal with its patriarchal society by her Anglophile father and sent to England.

She studied art at the Slade School of Fine Art in London;

There she also met her future husband, the British painter Victor Willing.