DIOGEN pro art magazine No 73...February 2017

An inspiration, not career

Although already in the ninth decade of her life, with an accompanying description of her own career 'the best painter of women's experience alive', she still feels frightened, which is extremely reflected in her art works. It isn't just the fact that the figures in her paintings, and her drawings, are often squatting, or bending, or lying, or stretching, in ways that look as if they would definitely give you cramp. It's what you can see in their faces. Paula Rego's women – and most of the figures in her work are women – are sad, and angry, and worried, and vengeful, and afraid.

Faced with the suffering of women in the Porugal during the twentieth century, her artistic vision are a kind of struggle for the creation and realization of the right for the life worthy of human, not only equal with the other sex, but often superior through the presentation of the enormous suffering with which women have been faced with. Of course, not only in Portugal, and not only then.