The MUNCH Museum in Oslo presents Paula Rego: A Thorny Dance, the most comprehensive retrospective dedicated to the Portuguese artist since the major exhibition organized by Tate Britain in 2021. With more than 140 works distributed across nine sections, the exhibition not only confirms the magnitude of one of the most important figurative painters of the second half of the twentieth century, but also reveals the extraordinary relevance of an artist who never yielded to trends or dominant market narratives.

The exhibition is supported by an outstanding museographic approach. Each gallery offers enough space for its thematic core to breathe, allowing visitors to immerse themselves in a complex, unsettling, and deeply human universe. From early political collages to the large pastels and textile sculptures of her later years, the exhibition reveals a trajectory marked by a rare coherence within contemporary art.

The curatorial starting point establishes a dialogue with Edvard Munch, an inevitable presence within this museum. The comparison between The Dance of Life by Munch and Rego’s The Dance (1988) is particularly revealing. This is not merely a formal reference; both works understand existence as an emotional choreography in which desire, power, loss, and memory intertwine inseparably. The inclusion of The Drought (1953), exhibited for the first time, also allows us to trace Rego’s early fascination with the psychological expressionism of the Norwegian artist.

However, the true strength of the exhibition emerges when the viewer enters the most personal territories of the artist. Born in 1935 in Salazar’s Lisbon, Paula Rego grew up under an authoritarian regime that severely restricted civil liberties and women’s rights. That political experience did not become propaganda, but rather poetic material. Her entire body of work seems constructed from a deep suspicion of power structures—whether familial, religious, sexual, or institutional.

In this sense, one of the most powerful sections is dedicated to her well-known abortion series. Decades before Portugal legalized abortion, Rego had already produced some of the most raw and honest images about the female experience. There is no victimization or sentimentality. Her women appear alone, exhausted, vulnerable, yet endowed with a fierce dignity. These works demonstrate how politics inhabits the body, and how legislation ultimately shapes personal intimacy.

Rego’s great strength lies precisely in her ability to transform specific subjects into universal experiences. Although deeply Portuguese, her work never remains confined to local narratives. Folk tales, fables, childhood memories, myths, and fantasies function as vehicles to address themes that cross all cultures: fear, domination, desire, violence, guilt, and rebellion.

Her visual universe occupies a singular territory. One can find echoes of Goya’s lucid cruelty, Francis Bacon’s psychological intensity, David Hockney’s social observation, and even Balthus’ unsettling eroticism. However, none of these references fully explain a body of work that is profoundly personal. Her characters seem to emerge from a parallel dimension where humans and animals exchange identities, where family hierarchies invert themselves, and where children’s stories reveal their underlying structures of control and violence.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the exhibition is Rego’s extraordinary capacity to represent human vulnerability. Her domestic scenes—set in bedrooms, living rooms, and private interiors—possess a striking psychological intensity. Exhausted women, girls facing rites of passage, families shaped by ambiguous power dynamics, and figures suspended between obedience and rebellion are portrayed with brutal honesty. These are deeply intimate images that avoid sentimentality while revealing the emotional complexities hidden within everyday life.

The exhibition also allows for an understanding of the artist’s formal evolution. The early collages possess an energy close to Neo-Dada, while later works move toward an increasingly forceful figuration. Her large pastels—arguably the peak of her production—display extraordinary technical mastery. Rego manages to give pictorial matter an almost sculptural presence, granting her figures an emotional density that is difficult to forget.

The inclusion of a wax sculpture by Ron Mueck, her son-in-law and one of the most recognized hyperrealist sculptors of our time, works as an interesting side note. Although belonging to very different artistic languages, both artists share an exceptional ability to create discomfort through the representation of the human body.

What is most remarkable about this retrospective is how clearly Paula Rego challenges certain weaknesses of contemporary art. In contrast to a production often dominated by ephemeral discourse, market strategies, or passing aesthetics, her work recovers something essential: the ability to tell complex stories about the human condition. She does not rely on theoretical frameworks to sustain her work. Its strength emerges from imagination, lived experience, and a profound understanding of human contradictions.

Although comparisons are always limited, Paula Rego’s work seems to inhabit a space somewhere between Francisco Goya and Lucian Freud. From the former she inherits the ability to expose the darker aspects of human nature, a critique of power, and an unflinching view of violence and desire. From the latter she adopts psychological intensity, corporeality, and the ability to turn human presence into an emotionally disturbing experience. Yet Rego transcends both influences, constructing a unique universe shaped by folklore, childhood memory, sexuality, and a deeply feminine perspective on power relations.

Upon leaving the exhibition, one is left with a rare sensation: that of having traversed a complete artistic universe. The viewer departs unsettled, fascinated, and above all convinced of having encountered a creator whose work will continue to resonate with future generations.

Because if this remarkable retrospective at the MUNCH Museum demonstrates anything, it is that Paula Rego did not paint only Salazar’s Portugal, nor solely the struggles of women of her time. She painted the most uncomfortable and truthful zones of human nature.

Paula Rego was an exceptional narrator of the most uncomfortable areas of human experience. Like Goya, she understood that imagination can reveal truths that reason prefers to conceal; like Lucian Freud, she knew that the body is also a psychological territory. From this combination emerges one of the most powerful, unsettling, and enduring bodies of work in contemporary European art.

It is especially significant to remember that Paula Rego passed away in 2022, the same year she participated in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani. Her presence in one of the most relevant editions of the Biennale in recent decades confirmed the definitive international recognition of an artist who, far from belonging to the past, remained in direct dialogue with contemporary debates on the body, identity, power, and the female condition.

Her death, only months later, ultimately consolidated the historical dimension of a body of work that already occupied a central place within twentieth and twenty-first century European art.

It was, in many ways, a symbolic farewell worthy of her legacy—she departed at the very moment when the art world fully acknowledged her as one of the great figurative artists of our time.

The Tate Britain retrospective in 2021, her participation in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, and her passing that same year form a sequence that reads almost as a final consecration—an artist who, for decades, worked from the margins of dominant contemporary art narratives, ultimately taking her place at the center of them.