The Portuguese-British artist leaves behind a large oeuvre. It is striking how many different styles and techniques she mastered: from imaginative abstract collages to realistic chalk drawings and surreal etchings. Rego also made dolls. She used them as models for her art. Her artworks are currently on display at the Venice Biennale.
Rego grew up in Portugal, where she received English-language education. When she was 16 years old, she was sent to a boarding school in London. There she studied art at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she met her husband Victor Willing, who was also an artist. They had three children and lived alternately in Portugal and London in the 1960s.
In 1966 Rego’s life took an unexpected turn for the worse. Her father died and her husband was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In addition, he decided to take over the family business in electrical engineering from his late father-in-law. That was not a success. Not much later, the broke family moved to London and Rego fell into a deep depression. That was a family ailment: her father had also suffered from depression.
Rego battled her demons with the help of Jungian psychoanalysis. She would continue to see her therapist for forty years. The theories of Carl Jung (1875-1961) had a great effect on her artistic development. According to Jung, fairy tales, myths and (folk) stories are expressions of our ‘collective unconscious’. With that in mind, Rego sometimes depicted scenes from her own life as disturbing fairy tales. She made a series of paintings about her marital problems, with a monkey (her husband), a bear (Rego’s lover) and a pigeon (Rego) as main characters.
In 1988, the year her husband died, Rego had major exhibitions in Lisbon and London, establishing her name as an artist internationally. It led to new commissions and exhibitions, including in the National Gallery in London. In 2006, the Portuguese government ordered the creation of a museum entirely dedicated to Rego. This museum opened near Lisbon in 2009 in a striking building designed by architect Eduardo Souto de Moura.
Rego’s work is often politically or socially engaged. For example, in early collages she criticized dictator António Salazar. In 1998 and 1999, Rego made a series of pastels depicting women suffering from illegal abortions. They are explicit and poignant scenes with which Rego tried to influence public opinion. In more recent works of art she depicted trafficking and circumcision of women. Still, according to her son Nick Willing, who made an award-winning documentary about his mother, she would never call herself an activist or feminist. “She fights for justice, but she prefers not to be pigeonholed.”
Last year Rego had a major retrospective at Tate Britain in London, which was subsequently shown in a reduced form in Kunstmuseum Den Haag. At the beginning of this year, the museum purchased one of its most famous works of art, The Pillowman (2004). Rego made this triptych based on the terrifying play of the same name by Martin McDonagh. In it, a ‘pillow man’ tries to convince children to commit suicide so that they can be spared suffering later on. According to her son Nick Willing, this pillow man in Rego’s work symbolizes her father. “If you put terrifying things into a work of art, they can no longer harm you. In fact, you’re going to care about them eventually,” Rego said.