Paula Rego: award winner 2020

Paula Rego was born in 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal. She studied at the Slade School of Art between 1952 and 1956 and settled permanently in London in 1963. In her native Portugal, the government commissioned the celebrated architect Eduardo Souto de Moura to design and build a museum dedicated exclusively to her work – Paula Rego’s House of Stories, situated in Cascais, which opened to the public in 2009. In the UK, her first major solo exhibition in London was held at AIR Gallery in 1981, followed in 1988 by an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. She was appointed the first National Gallery Associate Artist in 1989–90. In 2010 she was made a Dame of The British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. In 2020, she was awarded the Queen Sonja Lifetime Achievement Print Award. Paula Rego died in 2022 in London. 

  • Jury statement:

     

    The Lifetime Achievement Award is a celebration of an artist’s career and lifetime contribution to graphic art and printmaking. The 2020 Award goes to one of Europe’s most influential contemporary figurative artists. She is celebrated for her ambiguous complex compositions in paintings, drawings, and collages, as well as prints. Throughout her career, printmaking has been a space for exploration, and a fundamental part of her artistic oeuvre. Through her technical prowess, the artist has been in dialogue with the particularities of different printing techniques, matching and expanding upon them to interlock with her unique mode of expression. 

    Paula Rego (b. 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal) explores complex subject matters; psychologically charged depictions of human dramas and narratives. She depicts dysfunctional family relations, political systems, and social structures. Female perspectives are often at the forefront both thematically and compositionally. Novels, poems, nursery rhymes and fairy tales are reinterpreted in her prints, underlined by unconventional compositional devices. Extraordinary lithographs, intaglio- and screen prints are often produced in series. Their themes are many-faceted and detailed, open to the viewers’ interpretations. Paula Rego plays with both the expected and unexpected; disregarding scale and linear time, while at the same time juxtaposing important and less important pictorial elements. Rego’s work can be be viewed in the light of Francisco Goya and William Hogarth, where prints are used as political and social commentary, yet in their execution and exuberance they are highly original and modern.

    It is a great honor for the QSPA board to present Paula Rego with the second Lifetime Achievement Award for her distinguished contribution to the art of printmaking through a long and outstanding career.

  • Paula Rego, The Tea Party, 2009 From The Curved Planks Etching and aquatint on Somerset White Paper Paper: 64.3 x 50.2 cm - Image: 49.7 x 37.2 cm Paper: 25 1/4 x 19 3/4 in – Image: 19 5/8 x 14 5/8 in Edition of 75 cat ref: TH 261