Written by Ami John
02/11/25
Paula Rego – Untitled II (The Abortion Series) 1998
Paula Rego, Untitled II, from Untitled (The Abortion Series), 1999. Pastel on paper. © Paula Rego / Marlborough Fine Art, London.
Paula Rego challenged the shame, silence and humiliation surrounding abortion. Untitled II, from the series now held in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), feels painfully relevant to the political climate of today. We are watching a return to primitive attitudes of dishonour and stigma attached to reproductive rights and women’s autonomy.
Take Norma McCorvey, the woman at the centre of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that reshaped the fight for reproductive freedom in the United States after abortion was denied to her in Texas, her home state. Women like McCorvey helped establish the principle that bodily integrity is a basic right that must be protected. Yet this 1998 work serves as a powerful reminder that these struggles are happening all over again. In a Guardian interview, Rego condemned this regression as “grotesque.” She created the series in response to Portugal’s abortion referendum and was widely praised for influencing public opinion.
The work confronts the viewer with the pain, fear and desperation that surround illegal abortion. Rego said this is “what desperate women have always resorted to.” However, she refuses to portray her subject as powerless. The woman is depicted as an active agent, fully aware of her actions, reclaiming her dignity in the face of criminalisation. Her steady, almost stoic expression meets the viewer directly, asserting control that had been stripped from women by both law and society. It would take another nine years after the series was shown before Portugal finally legalised abortion, but Rego’s impact on public sentiment has never been forgotten.
In 2025, The Abortion Series remains both desolate and empowering. As protest art, it does not comfort or look away. Instead, it exposes, confronts and forces us to witness the ongoing fight for autonomy, a fight that is still far from over.
Leon Golub – Gigantomachy II (1966)
Leon Golub, Gigantomachy II, 1966. Acrylic on linen. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The left-wing painter Leon Golub portrays the endless struggle that humanity is condemned to repeat. Drawing inspiration from the Gigantomachy of the Pergamon Altar, the mythic battle between gods and giants, Golub revives one of the most pivotal visual narratives of Ancient Greek history. What matters here is not myth for its own sake, but the idea of perpetual conflict. Chaos and order are destined to collide again and again. One might think of Thomas Hobbes, who in 1651 wrote of the state of nature as a condition of relentless war, where human life corrodes without a powerful governing force to restrain it.
Is Golub’s painting a reminder of the difficult truth that humanity is fated to struggle without end? We see echoes everywhere: in the news, where warfare unfolds daily; in the failures of international bodies meant to preserve peace; and in the collapse of accountability that leaves liberty exposed and exploited. History repeats in cycles of conflict and misfortune. What sounds poetic in theory is, for many, a lived reality.
Golub’s classical realist approach reinforces this message. Painted on linen, Gigantomachy II uses both additive and subtractive techniques, methods more commonly associated with sculpture, to give the surface a raw, carved intensity. The work feels almost flayed and alive with anguish. The male nudes embody the brutality of the clash. Their bodies appear worn, eroded and exhausted, as if rotting under the weight of violence. The viewer cannot help but recognise something instinctual and animalistic in them. Golub condemns evil through confrontation rather than avoidance, reminding us that art does not merely reflect the human psyche, it interrogates it.
Liberate Tate – Human Cost (2011)
Liberate Tate, Human Cost, April 2011 (performance at Tate Britain, Duveen Gallery). Photograph by Amy Scaife. © Liberate Tate / Amy Scaife.
This was a piece by Amy Scaife, created as a response to museum culture and its acceptance of sponsorship from oil companies despite their responsibility for climate change. The work, a non-violent form of protest, invites audiences to reflect and push for a change in ethics, a shift in regime, and a different kind of uprising.
The fight against BP’s sponsorship of the Tate was especially controversial throughout the 2010s. The company eventually ended its twenty-six-year partnership in 2017, following long-standing cultural protests by activist groups. Human Cost depicts a miniature oil spill while a nude performer lies prostrate on the ground. Each participant was tattooed with the CO₂ levels of that year to emphasise the urgency of the fight against climate change, a struggle that is still consistently underestimated.
Greta Thunberg’s treatment in the media reflects the same culture that Human Cost interrogates: A culture that punishes refusal. As a young activist who began her protests as a teenager, she faced relentless criticism and ridicule. Commentators mocked her with phrases such as having an “apocalyptic dread in her eyes” and “go back to school,” and caricatures of her circulated widely. Despite this, she continued to advocate for climate justice and to expose the humanitarian consequences of environmental negligence.
Movements like Liberate Tate take this refusal further by confronting the institutions that enable ecological devastation. Their performance Human Cost lasted eighty-seven minutes in homage to the eighty-seven days of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, a disaster that unfolded in full view of the world. The action exposes the problem of reputation laundering, where powerful corporations and wealthy individuals attempt to sanitise their public image through philanthropy. The piece lays bare the human and environmental cost of these disasters and the structures that feed on their return.
Similar concerns were raised in 2020 by Senegalese activists speaking out about the exploitation of their country within the oil industry. Many pointed to unequal contracts, environmental damage, and the silencing of local communities who lacked the power to challenge multinational interests. Their protests revealed how the human cost of oil extends far beyond museum walls and Western sponsorship scandals. It is a global system in which marginalised voices fight to be heard while corporations profit from human and land exploitation. Thus, we are prompted to remember how climate change is inseparable from postcolonial justice.
Rego refuses subjugation, Golub refuses surrender and Liberate Tate refuses the quiet cruelty of complicity. Their work stands against a world that maintains violence as its logic and names it order. These are not passive images. They confront, expose and hold our attention to what many would prefer to ignore. The Human Chain of Demurral is built through artists who refuse silence, who challenge the systems that thrive on harm, and who make resistance visible. This is the aesthetics of refusal. It does not console. It insists. It endures. And by enduring, it demands that we do not look away.
Refusal is the first act of freedom.
Bibliography
Lack, Jessica. Protest Art (Art Essentials). London: Thames & Hudson, 2024.
Bakare, Lanre. “Paula Rego Calls US Anti-Abortion Drive ‘Grotesque’.” The Guardian, 31 May 2019.
Leon Golub, Gigantomachy II, 1966, acrylic on linen, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Liberate Tate. Human Cost. April 2011. Performance at Tate Britain, Duveen Gallery, London. Photograph by Amy Scaife. Courtesy Liberate Tate.
Rego, Paula. Untitled II. From Untitled (The Abortion Series). 1999. Pastel on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Fine Art, London.
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