Tate Britain, London
This bold retrospective shows that Rego came into her own in the 90s – when the BritArtists overshadowed her. So why show her work on garishly painted walls?
In the most staggering room in Paula Rego’s retrospective of seven decades’ painting, women crouch, crawl, kneel and sleep. One, called Dog Woman, goes down on all fours and contorts her face as if she is barking or howling. In the neighbouring picture, Bad Dog, a woman is seen from behind as she assumes a similarly abased position on a bed.
There are no men in any of these paintings but the strange poses into which the women are twisted could be dictated by an invisible man, grunting commands. Then again they might not. They might be suffering for God. Since these two scenes of torment and anguish, expressed in a physical casting down, seem to echo the 17th-century Spanish artist Jusepe de Ribera’s paintings of the punishments of the damned. Rego was born in Portugal in 1935 and her art is steeped in Iberian experience, from Catholicism to 20th-century dictatorship. It is a distinctive blend of that history and the meat-and-potatoes realism of the UK, where her parents sent her to escape Portugal’s authoritarian regime: a dream marriage of Hogarth and Ribera, with Goya and Buñuel under the bed.
