Dame Paula Rego RA was born in 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal. She died in London on 8 June 2022.
The largest and most comprehensive retrospective of Rego’s work to date was held at Tate Britain in 2021 (7 July–24 October 2021) and travelled to Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands (27 November 2021–20 March 2022), and Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain (26 April–21 August 2022). Works by the artist featured in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani (23 April – 27 November 2022).
Other current and recent major solo exhibitions include Paula Rego: rupture and continuity, Côa Museum, Portugal (13 December 2023 – 28 July 2024); Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden, The National Gallery, London, UK (20 July – 29 October 2023); Paula Rego: The Story of Stories, Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (23 December 2022 – 30 April 2023 ); Paula Rego: Subversive Stories, featuring prints from across her career, at Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (5 February–29 May 2022); Paula Rego: Literary Inspirations at Petersfield Museum, Hampshire, UK (23 March–9 July 2022); Power Games, Museum De Reede, Antwerp, Belgium (30 July–25 October 2021), and Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance, curated by Catherine Lampert, which travelled from MK Gallery, Milton Keynes to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh in 2019–2020 and was on view at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin from September 2020–May 2021.
In 2010, she was made a Dame of the British Empire for services to the Arts in the Queen’s Birthday Honours and was awarded the prestigious Grã-Cruz da Ordem de Sant’Iago da Espada from the President of Portugal in 2004. Rego has received several Honorary Doctorates from universities including the University of St. Andrews (1999), University of East Anglia (1999), Rhode Island School of Design (2000), The London Institute (2002), Oxford University (2005), Roehampton University (2005), Faculdade de Belas-Artes at the University of Lisbon (2011), and the University of Cambridge (2015). Rego was the recipient of many awards such as the Honors Medal of the city of Lisbon, Portugal (2016), the Maria Isabel Barreno prize (2017), Portuguese Government’s Medal of Cultural Merit (2019) and the Lifetime Achievement Award from Harper’s Bazaar (2019).
