What a painting this big asks of a wall

Afternoon, Repeated is three metres tall and four wide. It arrived rolled around a tube the size of a tree trunk, and it took a day and eight people to stretch it onto its frame.

The wall

We built a new wall for it, strong enough to hold the frame and plain enough to disappear. It took a week to plaster and three coats of white to stop the old wall showing through. When the painting went up, nobody looked at the wall again, which is exactly what a good wall is for.

The light

The painting is lit from above and from the side, so the thick paint casts its own small shadows. Pablo Arrieta spent an afternoon in the gallery with the lighting team, moving one lamp at a time, until the kitchen looked like four o’clock.

The bench

The last thing we added was the bench. It sits six metres back, which is where the painting stops being a painting of a kitchen and starts being a kitchen you could walk into.