Art involving children can be complicated to master when you don’t have one of your own. My press pass gave me one of the earliest looks at the Venice Biennale last week, and I never would have guessed that the Japanese pavilion from Of Arakawa-Nash it would be such a hit with my colleagues because it involves transporting a heavy-looking baby doll to various stations around the room. But it turns out that a lot of people really like babies and give them all sorts of aesthetic and behavioral liberties. My taste favors things more like install from Paula Rego (1935-2022) that was featured in the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale, Dream Milk, which featured mirrored images of childbirth and child abuse alongside a menagerie of grotesque and traumatized dolls.
Dance Among Thorns at MUNCH in Oslo is the Portuguese-British artist’s first comprehensive museum presentation in the Nordic region and Rego’s largest survey since a 2021 retrospective at Tate Britain. The exhibition brings together over 140 works spanning seven decades of practice, from early abstract political collages to the grotesque papier-mâché paintings of her final years. A central section traces a previously undocumented engagement with Edvard Munch: curator Kari J. Brandtzæg noted compositional and thematic connections between Rego The dance (1988) and Munch’s The Dance of Life (1898-1899), among other works.
The dance is one of Rego’s best-known works, a masterpiece in which a group of compelling and diverse characters dance on a moonlit sea cliff. Their clothes, faces, size and coloring are all weird in compelling ways. This is especially true of the woman in white on the left, who is larger than the others and who dances alone. It is likely a self-portrait of Rego, whose husband Victor Willing died while she was painting it. This aspect looks even bigger when you compare it to him The Dance of Lifewhich Rego saw at the Tate in 1951 at the age of 16. In it, two figures spin together, almost consumed by a red dress, the intensity of their love standing in relief against the lonely and greedy people around them. They live in their own world, just like these two painters.
Exploring the connections between Munch and Rego led to the discovery of DROUGHT (1953) by Rego’s son Nick Willing. This never-before-exhibited work is impressive for an 18-year-old and owes much to Munch, especially Legacy (1897-99), “showing a woman seated weeping with a skeletal child, painted green, on her lap,” according to a 1951 letter from Rego to her mother, in which she calls it her favorite in the Tate show. DROUGHT borrows the subject but has more in common with Scream (circa 1910), because it features small strokes of red and yellow, and twisted alien features.
In this show is also the monument of Rego Oratorio (2008-09), a three-meter-high wooden cabinet with eight pastel panels surrounding a painting of handmade orphan dolls. This was the work I saw in Venice so many years ago, and it has become more important since 2022. How beautiful it would be to exist in a world of consensual, eternal love where children are always loved.
“Paula Rego: Dance among the thorns” is on view at MUNCH in Oslo until August 2, 2026.
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