Sarah Corrie Constructing Stories Telling Tales

Born in Portugal, Paula Rego is that great rarity a Britain artist with an international reputation. Her lasting reputation of is beyond doubt. Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, describes her as a major figure that has "taken her own childhood experiences, memories, fantasies and fears, and given them universal significance". For Germaine Greer, whose 1995 portrait by Rego hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, her work is both feminist and subversive; "It is not often given to women to recognise themselves in painting, still less to see their private world, their dreams, the insides of their heads, projected on such a scale and so immodestly, with such depth and colour.