Three quotations sum up Paula Rego’s approach to her monumental work Crivelli’s Garden, a free, one-painting exhibition at the National Gallery in London.
First: “If the story is ‘given’, I take liberties with it to make it conform to my own experiences, and to be outrageous.” You step into Room 46 and you are confronted with a huge stretch of work containing dozens of figures, large and small, taking up the whole wall. It is outrageous – but in the most splendid way.
When Dame Paula Rego (1935-2022) was appointed the first associate artist – effectively artist-in-residence – at the National Gallery in 1990-92, she was commissioned to create a mural for the new Sainsbury Wing dining room. Working in a studio in the gallery’s basement, the result was the 31-foot-long Crivelli’s Garden, not actually a mural, because it’s painted on canvas, not directly on the wall.
