It’s part of it. Some people can feel more dominant than others, but a maid can have power over her mistress. The meekest person can manipulate.

Girlhood and its appetites have inspired Paula Rego’s picture-making for over 30 years, and her works in this vein include the brilliantly fluent and mischievous sequence of paintings The Vivian Girls, inspired by Henry Darger’s extraordinary, epic scroll novel, populated by heroines, part Enid Blyton schoolgirls, part Surrealist femmes-enfants. Furiously intent young women, capricious, cruel, wilful in their confined domesticity, attend to one another or to animals or to daily, banal tasks; the scenes Paula Rego summons up dramatise the limits on female expectation imposed on Rego in her youth. For although she comes from a liberal family, she was steeped in the culture of Salazar’s dictatorship, founded on the Catholic church, the army, and the idealisation of Woman as wife and mother. The perverted uses of female power, when squeezed behind the scenes, or into the sewing room and the kitchen, erupt in Rego’s imagery with seemingly irrepressible force; she brims over with the same keen, impassioned sense of its malignity as Charlotte Brontë does in her creation of Bertha Mason. PR: The pictures have changed many times. They have to change, or they feel dead and I feel flat. You get interested in other things as you get older. I’m more interested in the Virgin Mary than in boyfriends. Between 1986 and 1988, Rego completed a group of large paintings in acrylic, which are brought together in this room. In 1988, they were displayed in solo exhibitions in Lisbon and Porto, Portugal, and at the Serpentine Gallery, London. The shows cemented Rego’s reputation as a leading contemporary painter. At the time, she had not yet completed The Dance, so could not include it as she had hoped. The work features here in the way the artist intended, as the culmination of this body of work.It was her father who sent her to England (to finishing school, at 16), insisting Portugal was, as she once put it, a “killer society for women”. Her mother was less of a kindred spirit: “She loved interior decorating. I hate it. She was spikier. But she was talented. She could do a person’s likeness just like that, and cut clothes without a pattern.” Rego has inherited her mother’s skills and subverted them. In her hands, traditionally feminine crafts turn militant. Homemade dolls – potentially docile and lifeless – come defiantly alive. She knows the needle – and the brush – can be mightier than the sword. Very much so: when you look at the reality of what’s happening, why wouldn’t you want to help the women? There are questions of domination in many of your paintings. The question about who is mastering – or mistressing – whom feels particularly key in Snare (1987) and some of the Jane Eyre pieces. How far do you see relationships as a power struggle? Rego found similarities between the images of those women diagnosed with hysteria and poses of female saints traditionally seen in Roman Catholic religious paintings. Possession represents a woman’s experience of both martyrdom and self-determination. Crucially, Rego empowers her subject through the expression of their sexuality.

While working on a large-scale painting at home one day, in 1965, the artist Paula Rego went downstairs to find her husband kissing another woman. The painting, in oil and collage, was about a government policy to poison stray dogs in Barcelona, and there was a glaring blank spot at the top. After watching her husband kiss the other woman, Rego, as she tells it, went running to her neighbor and best friend. Crying, she recounted what had happened, only to find her friend dissolve into tears as well. She, too, was sleeping with Rego’s husband. In 1998 a referendum to legalise abortion in Portugal failed. Paula Rego, who spoke openly about her own abortions in the past and had seen people suffer after undergoing illegal terminations, was angry with the outcome. In response, she created a body of work, including paintings, pastels and etchings. In 2006 the Portuguese government commissioned a museum dedicated to Rego whichopened in 2009. The Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, located in a district outside Lisbon, permanently houses Rego's entire collection of over 200 prints alongside drawings, preparatory works and paintings loaned by the artist. R ego exhibited an extensive display of sculptural installations, pastels and prints in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2022.

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It features over 100 works, including collage, paintings, large-scale pastels, ink and pencil drawings and etchings. These include early works from the 1950s in which Rego first explored personal as well as social struggle, her large pastels of single figures from the acclaimed Dog Women and Abortion series and her richly layered, staged scenes from the 2000-10s. The following year, Rego went on to study painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1952–6). Here she met and later married fellow painting student Victor Willing. After graduating, Rego lived between Britain and Portugal and settled in London in 1972.