Paula Rego: Drawing from Life | Cristea Roberts Gallery
Apparently Paula Rego used to take the bus from her home in Hampstead to her studio in Kentish Town each day. A touchingly down to earth detail for an artist who hit such heights of fame and accomplishment. She ended her days in 2022 a Dame of the British Empire, a veteran of multiple monograph museum retrospectives, and having established a beautiful foundation in her native Cascais, Portugal.
I took a trip to that foundation late last year as a sort of pilgrimage. Since I can remember, I’ve always loved her viscerally emotional, subversive drawings and paintings - based on politics, opera, fairy tales, and synthesised through her unique artistic imagination. The Casa das Histórias Paula Rego is a beautiful jewel box-like building in well-maintained grounds, close to the beach and Atlantic ocean. It contains a tightly-edited roundup of Rego’s long career (she was an active artist after she graduated in the early 50s, and painted to the end); it was empty when I visited, it had an atmosphere of silent reverence.
All a world away from Kentish Town. A part of Rego’s studio, along with some arrestingly grotesque drawings from 2005 to 2007, is currently on show at Cristea Roberts Gallery. The studio itself has become her posthumous archive. Although the studio objects are set in a fancy white box in Mayfair, they still emanate a down-home griminess. A flimsy sink contains a plastic doll. There’s a scarecrow in a dress. A papier mache pig’s head - Rego’s favourite animal - is patchily covered, its exoskeleton of wire showing through in parts.
The props on show were all used in the exhibition’s drawings. The pig and the scarecrow figure reappear again and again, in various distressed contortions. Rego staged the scenes in the studio so she could draw “from life”.
Rego’s pastels, on a flimsy trolley next to her chair, are thoroughly used. Most movingly, an apron and a jumper, surely the artist’s, are draped over the chair. For some reason - even though Rego died wealthy, famous and beloved - I found the ramshackle assemblage sad. Sad because of what had been lost: the unique, animating imagination that transformed these grubby props and stubby pastels into something great, something from life.
Paula Rego: Drawing from Life is at Cristea Roberts Gallery (London). 27 November 2025 - 17 January 2026