Paula Rego has unflinchingly channelled the anger of her times. Now in her eighties, the artist shows no sign of stopping

MIRANDA FRANCE

Subversive subtexts: Paula Rego’s The Dance (1988)

© PAULA REGO THE DANCE 1988. TATE © PAULA REGO

If one of the aims of an artist is to reveal aspects of humanity to the viewer, then Paula Rego favours the dark side. For more than 70 years she has explored— obsessively, some might say—the hidden motivations that underpin human behaviour.

In Tate Britain’s current retrospective, which runs until 24th October, the earliest canvas dates from 1950 when Rego was just 15. Titled Interrogation, it shows a young girl, head bowed, body contorted by fear, sitting between two faceless men. Among the last canvases in the show is a series Rego made between 2007-2009 about female genital mutilation. The characters in these FGM paintings look oddly jaunty, both victims and perpetrators sometimes resembling dolls, or the kind of caricatures that might accompany a Dickens novel. Like Dickens, like Picasso, Rego sees horror as part of life’s carnival. Her artistic disquisitions—often inspired by the news, but also by books, philosophy and plays—are drawn from a colourful palette, canvases imbued with the Iberian warmth of her upbringing in Portugal.

It’s that disconcerting distance between surface and subtext that makes her work so compelling. One of the most distinctive voices in British art, Rego ought to be as admired as David Hockney, also in his eighties and currently the subject of a major London show—but she isn’t. Perhaps the facts that she is Portuguese-born, and a woman, complicate our affiliation. Even when resident in California or France, Hockney is recognisably a Yorkshireman. Rego’s unwillingness to “belong” anywhere, except the studio, makes her harder to embrace. She would rather be an outsider.