Under Milk Wood, which I did at the Slade. Because I did it from my imagination and it won the summer prize. The main level has an immersive installation Duveens Commission – RUPTURE NO.1: blowtorching the bitten peach which includes sudden loud noises. Quiet hours will be available on select dates for those who require a quieter visit. During this time the sounds for the Duveens commission will be turned off.

This exhibition tells the story of this artist’s extraordinary life, highlighting the personal nature of much of her work and the socio-political context in which it is rooted. It also reveals the artist’s broad range of references, from comic strips to history painting. 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. 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. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Rego mainly produced collage-based works. She began this process by making drawings. She would cut these up, glue fragments on paper and add layers of paint and other drawings. Rather than using an easel, she worked on a table or on the floor. She relished this more tactile and intuitive way of working. In these works, Rego bears witness to injustice. She expresses her feelings of rage and anguish connected with world politics and events, from the cruelty of Portugal’s authoritarian regime to poor conditions for workers.

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In 2004, Rego asked her model Lila Nunes to pose for a series of large pastels titled Possession I–VII. It was inspired by late 19th century photographs of medical lectures showing women diagnosed with ‘hysteria’. This term was used to describe a wide range of psychological conditions, and has shaped prejudices about women’s assumed weak mental constitution. At the time, some believed hysteria to be ‘demonic possession’. This is a unique opportunity to survey, in the city that Rego has lived in and called home for most of her life, the full range of her work. 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. Rego’s fascination with storytelling has never faded. She has spent her life listening out for stories and turning them into pictures. The 1990s was a particularly productive period. Working in oil and acrylic paint, watercolour, and etching and aquatint, Rego took inspiration from a wide range of sources. Her series of Nursery Rhymes prints from 1989 illustrate traditional British children’s songs. Rego was delighted by the strangeness of these rhymes, which she highlights in her prints.

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. It is this weakness of imaginative projection, for most of us, that lends such power to technical media that simulate the stuff that dreams are made on: daguerreotypes, phantasmagoria, lantern slides, and film replicate the thinness, spectrality, and fugitive aspects of conscious, mental acts of visualisation. These comments on cognitive capacity offer a context for thinking about Rego and about the distinctive principles of book illustration, for what she achieves is precisely that solidity, that density of presence, that stable durability that usually elude the mind’s eye of the reader. But – and this but is a most important modifier – her images do not realise Jane Eyre or other figures as in the literal enactments of contemporary full-colour cinema: they retain dreamlike qualities. In the typical realist television adaptation, there are so many historic locations and vehicles, props and costumes, such heaps of furniture and whole archives of ornaments, but drawing out of the mind straight on to the plate or the stone doesn’t need the half of all that paraphernalia: in its grasp of mood and atmosphere, of the dream feeling, just a minimum of external detail is necessary.It's all here – gutsy paintings full of rage, rebellion and pain – especially of women. And much more besides. Rego's vision of life can be red in tooth and claw to the point of being agonising to look at. The wonderful surprise here is to remember how lyrical, as well as mischievous, playful and so very human it can also be. I would not describe her like that. She is my main model and very good at it. She understands what I need from a story.

Were you ever afraid with your bold abortion pictures that the Portuguese authorities would try to suppress your work? Tales from the National Gallery, Travelling Exhibition: Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery; Middlesborough Art Gallery; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Cooper Art Gallery, Barnsley; the National Gallery, London; the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon In Paula Rego’s work, in her ‘artist’s dreamland’, the peculiar and the elfish twist and turn with a similar rebellious vitality. And they do so for reasons that Jane Eyre’s did, mirroring Charlotte Brontë’s, over a hundred and fifty years ago. Rego has explored, in a myriad different sequences of pictures, the conditions of her own upbringing in Portugal, her formation as a girl and a woman, and the oscillation between stifling social expectations and liberating female stratagems. 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. To help plan your visit to Tate Britain, have a look at our visual story. It includes photographs and information of what you can expect from a visit to the gallery.Featuring over 100 illustrations, including collage, paintings, largescale pastels, ink and pencil drawings, etchings and sculpture, the catalogue reflects the richness of Rego’s work, from the socio-political context to the biographical, from her many literary references to her vast knowledge and referencing of key historical paintings from the Western tradition. This includes early work from the 1950s in which Rego first explored personal as well as social struggles, with her large pastels of single figures from the acclaimed Dog Women and Abortion series and her richly layered, staged scenes from the 2000-10s.

Her imagery can be confrontational, dazzlingly so: "Paula takes you to uncomfortable places – Jung called it the Shadow. They are taboo areas, where love and cruelty touch each other, and our drives and fears live," says Crippa. These unclear boundaries are "exactly where she likes to put us… Yet they're drawn with infinite compassion. She takes us on that journey of empathy." Major solo exhibitions of Rego's work have recently taken place atThe National Gallery, London (2023); Pera Museum, Istanbul; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover; Arnolfini, Bristol (2022);Tate Britain, London, travelling to Kunstmuseum den Haag, Netherlands, Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain (2021-22); the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, which toured from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2019-2020); Musée de L'Orangerie, Paris (2018); La Virreina Centro de la Imagen, Barcelona (2018); Jerwood Gallery, Hastings (2017); Pallant House, Chichester (2017). Play seems equally important. I sometimes have the feeling, looking at your work, that a real person might revert to becoming a straw doll, or vice versa… Is play intrinsically dangerous?

Retrospective Exhibition, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington 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. Tate Britain's Manton Entrance is on Atterbury Street. It has automatic sliding doors and there is a ramp down to the entrance with central handrails.