Art that involves children can be hard to find if you don’t have your own. My press pass gave me a first look at the Venice Biennale last week, and I couldn’t have predicted that Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Japanese platform would be the best among my colleagues, because it involves dragging a heavy-looking baby doll to various stations around the room. But it turns out that many people really love children, and give them all kinds of beauty and manners. My taste favors things like Paula Rego’s (1935-2022) installation that appeared in the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale, “Milk of Dreams,” which featured scenes of childbirth and child abuse, as well as a menagerie of ugly 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 major survey from 2021 Tate Britain. The exhibition includes more than 140 works spanning seven decades of practice, from abstract political collages to the dramatic papier-mâché tableaux of his last years. The central part traces the previously unofficial collaboration with Edvard Munch: the curator Kari J. Brandtzæg noticed compositional and thematic links between Rego’s. The dance (1988) and Munch 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 cliff by the sea. Their clothes, faces, proportions and color are all strange in compelling ways. This is especially true of the woman in white on the far left, who is larger than the others and dancing alone. It is probably a portrait of Rego, whose husband Victor Willing died while painting it. This feature appears larger in comparison The Dance of LifeRego saw it at the Tate in 1951 when he was 16. In it, two people walk around together, almost consumed by a red dress, the intensity of their love standing freely against the lonely, cruel people around them. They live in their country, in the same way as these two artists.
An examination of the links between Munch and Rego led to the discovery of Drought (1953) is Rego’s son, Nick Willing. This never-before-seen work is impressive for an 18-year-old, and owes a lot to Munch, especially his work. Legacy (1897-99), “depicting a seated weeping woman with a skeletal child, all painted green in her lap,” according to Rego’s 1951 letter to his mother in which he called it his favorite of the Tate exhibition. Drought it borrows the title but has a lot in common Shouting (c.1910), because it has red and yellow layers, and unusual twisted features.
In this exhibition there is also a memorial to Rego The Oratorio (2008-09), a three-meter-high wooden cabinet with eight pastel panels surrounds a table of orphaned papier-mâché dolls. This was a work I saw in Venice many years ago, and it has grown in importance since 2022. How wonderful it would be to exist in a harmonious, eternally loving world where children are always valued.
“Paula Rego: Dance Among the Thorns” is on view at MUNCH in Oslo until August 2, 2026.
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