PAULA REGO

Description
Born in 1935 in Portugal, Dame Paula Rego is the best-known woman artist in Britain. Her large-scale figurative pictures offer complex narratives loaded with tensions and dramas, exploring a range of emotions that lie just below the surface of things. Depictions of folk tales or strong women in sometimes disturbing situations, made largely since 1990, seem to bring together the methods of painting and printmaking with an emphasis on strong and clearly drawn forms. Her work always has a sense of magical realism; quirky contemporary mythologies pointing to an underlying psychology or sexuality. This lavish catalogue of a 2007 retrospective exhibition at the Reina Sofia in Madrid includes 250 illustrations of paintings, drawings and prints from 1953 to 2007; extensive interviews with Rego; essays by Marco Livingstone and Robert Hughes; a chronology and a bibliography. It is the most comprehensive publication on the artist's work.