CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Riveted by Rego's realm
Visceral, confrontational and emotionally charged, the retrospective of scenarios by the great Portuguese artist transfixes JAN WOOLF
TROUBLING TALES: (L to R) The Dance (1988) and The Policeman’s Daughter (1987)
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Paula Rego
Tate Britain, London
FIGURATIVE art has become fashionable again, apparently.
Yet the extraordinary Paula Rego probably couldn’t care less. Pushing on through the fashionable Young British Artists era of the 1980s, she has always drawn and painted what she needed to.
Born in Portugal in 1935, she was brought to England by parents opposed to the fascist Salazar regime — God, Homeland and Family was one of its guiding slogans and the Female Portuguese Youth was set up to train girls for domesticity.
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MIRANDA RICHMOND relishes the gloriously liberated art of Roy Oxlade, and traces his method back to the thinking of David Bomberg, his acknowledged teacher
SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective
JAN WOOLF ponders the works and contested reputation of the West German sculptor and provocateur, who believed that everybody is potentially an artist
JOHN GREEN welcomes a remarkable study of Mozambique’s most renowned contemporary artist