Dame Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego DBE RA GCSE GOSE GColCa (Portuguese: [ˈpawlɐ ˈʁeɣu]: 26 January 1935 – 8 June 2022) was a Portuguese visual artist, widely considered the pre-eminent woman artist of the late 20th and early 21st century, known particularly for her paintings and prints based on storybooks.

Rego studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and was an exhibiting member of The London Group, along with David Hockney and Frank Auerbach.

[5][6] Her mother was a competent artist but, as a conventional Portuguese woman from the early 20th century, gave her daughter no encouragement towards a career, even though she began drawing at age 4.

He suggested to her parents that the Slade School of Fine Art was a more respectable choice and helped her achieve a place there.

[10] Although Rego was commissioned by her father to produce a series of large-scale murals to decorate the works' canteen at his electrical factory in 1954, while she was still a student, Rego's artistic career effectively began in early 1962, when she began exhibiting with The London Group,[11] a long-established artists' organization, which had David Hockney and Frank Auerbach among its members.

[14] In 1988, Rego was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Serpentine Gallery in London.

[19] In her work, Snow White is pictured after she has eaten the poisoned apple and appears older and in some type of physical pain.

[23] In 2008, Rego exhibited at the Marlborough Chelsea in New York, and staged a retrospective of her graphic works at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes, France.

[34] A huge embroidery by Paula Rego (250 × 650 centimeters) depicts the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, which pitted the troops of King Sebastian I of Portugal against those of the Moroccan sultan Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik in 1578.

She also stated that it disproportionately affected poor women, as it was easier for the rich to find a safe abortion (irrespective of the law) because they could afford to travel abroad for the procedure.

[39] The pastels show images of women in positions such as fetal, squatting, etc., either getting ready to have an abortion, in the process of having one, or in pain from the procedure.

In a 2002 interview Rego stated: "The series was born from my indignation… It is unbelievable that women who have an abortion should be considered criminals.

But all this stems from Portugal's totalitarian past, from women dressed up in aprons, baking cakes like good housewives.

[42] At the Slade School of Fine Art, Rego began an affair with fellow student Victor Willing, who was already married to another artist, Hazel Whittington.

Victor's heavy drinking had worried his father-in-law, who had advised the couple to sell the business after his death and return to England.

[7] The company failed in 1974 following the Carnation Revolution that overthrew the country's right-wing Estado Novo dictatorship, when its production works were taken over by revolutionary forces although Rego's family had been supporters of the political Left.

[50] This shows itself not only in the type of imagery that appears in these works, but in the method employed, which is based on the Surrealist idea of automatic drawing, in which the artist attempts to disengage the conscious mind from the drawing process in order to allow the unconscious mind to direct the making of an image.

But Rego was also reacting against her training at the Slade School of Art, where there had been a very strong emphasis on anatomical figure drawing.

[54] A notable change in Rego's style emerged in 1990, following her appointment as the first Associate Artist of the National Gallery in London in what was effectively an artist-in-residence scheme.

"[55] The National Gallery is overwhelmingly an Old Masters collection and Rego seems to have been pulled back towards a much clearer, or tighter, linear style reminiscent of the highly-wrought drawing technique that she was taught at the Slade.

Paula Rego challenges traditional female depictions by illustrating women in their natural state of strength and power, showing the reality of womanhood rather than trying to satisfy the gaze of the viewer.

[58] Rego embraces sensational behaviors that are not necessarily considered to be feminine by social constructs, yet all people experience this humanistic feeling.

She acknowledged having read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, a key feminist text, at a young age, and that this had made a deep impression on her.

[63] She used acrylic paint for The Vivian girls as windmills[64] (1984, Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian), inspired by Henry Darger's "In the Realms of the Unreal."

[79] In 2022, she was posthumously made a Grand Collar of the Order of Camões by the President of the Portuguese Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.