HANNOVER.- The highlight of the new season at the Kestner Gesellschaft is the exhibition Paula Rego.

There and Back Again – by one of the most important and recognized artists of our time, the Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego (1935-2022). Almost the entire house is dedicated to this first, lovingly curated solo exhibition of Paula Rego in Germany: with more than 80 works (paintings, pastels, drawings, prints, costumes) from European museums and galleries, including the Tate Modern, the National Gallery and the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, as well as the museum Gulbenkian in Lisbon.

For the first time on view outside the National Gallery in London: Crivelli’s Garden

Co-curated by British author and art critic Alistair Hicks and the director of the Kestner Gesellschaft, Adam Budak, and designed by Portuguese-French architect Didier Fiúza Faustino, the exhibition Paula Rego. There and Back Again is conceived as an opera about human existence, staged in several acts. At its epicenter is Rego's monumental masterpiece Crivelli's Garden, a powerful anti-patriarchal statement of art historical revision that has never been seen outside its place of origin, the National Gallery London. Crivelli's Garden is one of the few works commissioned by the National Gallery in London; it was created in 1990-1991 when Rego was the first "Associate Artist" at the National Gallery.

Paula Rego. Theatrum Mundi - First reconstruction of the artist's studio
Oct. 30, 2022 – Jan. 29, 2023

Paula Rego. Theatrum Mundi is the first ever attempt at fully reconstructing Paula Rego’s studio. As such, it offers a unique insight into the artist’s creative process of working and thinking, inviting us on a journey into a transgressive and grotesque world of theatrical imagination, and celebrating Rego’s unparalleled versatility and the magic of her storytelling.

“My world takes place inside my studio!”

About her workplace, Rego herself said, "My world takes place in my studio. Most of it consists of things I brought from Portugal many years ago: Clothes, certain dolls. There are suits that belonged to my grandmother ..."

Divided into two spaces, the quiet room (rest and thinking) and the busy room (work and action), the studio had been carefully and tenderly reconstructed by Lila Nunes, who has been Rego’s most important and longstanding creative friend, and a sitter who frequently posed for several significant works, including Angel, 1998, and the Dancing Ostrich series, 1995, on view in the exhibition.

The work of Paula Rego, who courageously challenges political myths and examines human relationships in a subtle way, but with brutal honesty and dignity, is more relevant than ever and testifies to resilience and an incomparable subversive and rebellious power. Its title is borrowed from the ballet Pra lá e pra sá [There and Back Again] which the English composer

Louisa Lasdun composed in 1998. The ballet, presented in the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, was inspired by her seeing Paula Rego’s Nursery Rhymes prints, and for which Rego designed the costumes.