It can be difficult to accommodate art involving children when you don’t have any of your own. My press card gave me one of the first looks at the Venice Biennale last week, and I never expected that the Japanese pavilion designed by Ei Arakawa Nash would be such a hit among my colleagues, since it involves dragging a small, heavy-looking dollhouse to various stations around the room. But it turns out that a lot of people really love children, and give them all kinds of aesthetic and behavioral freedom. My own taste favors things more like the installation by Paola Rego (1935-2022) that appeared in the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale, “Dream Milk,” which displayed mirrored images of childbirth and child abuse, alongside a collection of grotesque and traumatized dolls.
Dancing Among Thorns at MUNCH in Oslo is the Portuguese-British artist’s first comprehensive museum show in the Nordic region, and Rego’s largest survey since the 2021 Tate Britain retrospective. The exhibition brings together more than 140 works across seven decades of practice, from early abstract political collages to the grotesque paper paintings of her final years. The central section traces a previously undocumented engagement with Edvard Munch: curator Kari J. Brandtzig noted the compositional and thematic connections between Rigo’s works The dance (1988) and Munch Dance of life (1898-1899), among other works.
The dance It is one of Rigaud’s most famous works, a masterpiece in which a group of attractive and diverse characters dance on a moonlit coastal cliff. Their clothes, faces, proportions, and colors 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 who is dancing alone. It is probably a self-portrait of Rigaud, whose husband Victor Welling died while she was painting it. This side looks bigger when compared to it Dance of lifewhich Rego saw at Tate in 1951 when he was 16 years old. In it, two people are curled up together, almost consumed by a red dress, and the intensity of their love stands in relief against the lonely, lustful people surrounding them. They live in their own world, just as these two painters did.
Exploring the links between Monk and Rigaud led to a discovery drought (1953) by Rego’s son, Nick Welling. This previously unseen work is impressive for an 18-year-old, and owes much to Munch, particularly his artwork. Inheritance (1897-99), “which shows a seated woman crying with a skeletal child on her lap, painted entirely in green,” is a 1951 letter by Rigaud to her mother describing her favorite painting in the Tate Gallery. drought It borrows the theme but has more in common with Shout (circa 1910), because it is characterized by chunky stripes of red and yellow, and strange, contorted features.
Also in this display is the massive Rego statue Oratory (2008-09), a three-metre-high wooden cabinet with eight pastel panels surrounding a panel of hand-made papier-mâché orphan dolls. This was the work I saw in Venice many years ago, and it has become even more relevant since 2022. How beautiful it would be to live in a world of eternal consensual love where children are always cherished.
“Paola Rego: Dancing Among the Thorns“On display at MUNCH in Oslo until August 2, 2026.
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