Are there particular challenges in curating a retrospective of this scale?
The retrospective was actually much, much bigger in its original incarnation: There were just over 200 works in the Madrid show, including many large paintings that we simply didn’t have space to hang in Washington, D.C. It is always a tall order borrowing back such major works from both museums and private collectors, but everyone was unbelievably generous and supportive, including Charles Saatchi — who owns the most important and extensive collection of Paula’s pictures — as well as her two most enthusiastic institutional patrons, the Tate in London and the Gulbenkian in Lisbon. The exhibition’s wall labels (and the excellent exhibition catalogue) draw heavily on Paula’s own comments about her pictures. What is the story behind this? I was very keen that Paula’s voice be heard and persuaded her to do a series of interviews with me from which these commentaries were then extracted. She is an extremely engaging storyteller, and having her unlock the narratives seemed a wonderful way in
