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Art that involves children can be complicated to absorb when you have none of your own. My press pass gave me one of the earliest looks at the Venice Biennale last week, and I would never have predicted that the Japanese pavilion by Ei Arakawa-Nash would be such a hit among my colleagues, because it involves hauling a heavy-looking baby doll to various stations around the room. But it turns out that many people really like babies, and grant them all kinds of aesthetic and behavioral leeway. My own taste favors stuff more like the installation by Paula Rego (1935-2022) that appeared in the 59th Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams,” 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 first comprehensive museum presentation of the Portuguese-British artist in the Nordic region, and Rego’s largest survey since a 2021 Tate Britain retrospective. The exhibition brings together over 140 works across seven decades of practice, from early abstract political collages to the grotesque papier-mâché tableaux of her final years. A central section traces a previously undocumented engagement with Edvard Munch: curator Kari J. Brandtzæg noticed compositional and thematic links between Rego’s The Dance (1988) and Munch’s 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 varied characters dances on a moonlit seaside cliff. Their clothes, faces, proportions and coloring are all strange in compelling ways. This is especially true for the woman in white on the far 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 looms even larger when you compare it to Dance of Life, which Rego saw at the Tate in 1951 at age 16. In it, two figures swirl together, almost consumed by a red dress, the intensity of their love standing in relief against the lonely, lascivious people surrounding them. They live in their own world, much the way these two painters did.
The exploration of the links 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, particularly his Inheritance (1897-99), “which shows a seated woman crying with a skeleton child, all painted green, in her lap,” per a 1951 letter by 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 The Scream (c.1910), for it features chunky strokes of red and yellow, and twisted alien features.
Also in this show is Rego’s monumental Oratorio (2008-09), a three-meter-high wood cabinet with eight pastel panels surrounding a tableau of handmade papier-mâché orphan dolls. This was the work I saw in Venice so many years ago, and it has only grown more relevant since 2022. How nice it would be to exist in a world of consensual, everlasting love where children are always cherished.
“Paula Rego: Dance Among Thorns” is on view at MUNCH in Oslo through August 2, 2026.
