Celia Paul is “a person in love with the romance of that which can never be,” or so says critic Hilton Als in a brand new monograph of her work. That sense of nostalgia permeates the British painter’s oeuvre, collected for the primary time in Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025, which incorporates 5 essays, together with one by the artist herself. The alternatively crusty and drippy surfaces of Paul’s work are intensely tactile — they really feel like a present of power or, as she has put it, “defiance.” Paul has known as herself an “autobiographer” moderately than a portrait painter, and the way in which this e-book presents her life’s work confirms that title. Her life comes into focus as she returns to the identical topics time and again: the ladies in her household, the British Museum, and the ocean.
The e-book is weighted towards current works, many coping with the loss of life of Paul’s mom in 2015. Paul painted her sisters in grief, repeatedly, and her self-portrait again and again. Paul has been one in every of her personal chief topics all through her profession, however she feels that she wasn’t in a position to paint a real likeness of herself constantly till after her mom’s loss of life.
Celia Paul, “My Sisters in Mourning” (2015) from Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025 (MACK, 2025)
Her two books, Self-Portrait (2019) and Letters of Gwen John (2022), additionally got here out of her grief. In a dialog with English artist Edmund de Waal reprinted within the e-book, she says that she turned to writing as a result of “painting wasn’t a way of working through this journey of grief in the way that I needed to.” After the publication of Self-Portrait, Paul began receiving new sorts of reward and criticism from fellow ladies. Rachel Cusk wrote a profile of her for the New York Instances Journal, which Paul so strongly felt was incorrect that she wrote Letters to Gwen John partly as a rebuttal.
House, or lack thereof, is one other key theme all through Paul’s life and this monograph. She was born in India to British missionary mother and father and moved to England with them at age 5 to reside in a succession of vicarages till she was despatched to boarding faculty. After starting a relationship with Lucian Freud whereas a scholar on the Slade College of Advantageous Artwork, he purchased her a flat in Bloomsbury instantly reverse the British Museum, the place she has lived ever since. Her life is exceptionally ascetic, however she says that “‘home’ remains a consistent source of yearning.” Her repetitive portray of herself demonstrates her profound, sustained curiosity in her place on the planet. Now, at age 65, she writes within the monograph that she has realized that “painting myself might be like coming home.”
Celia Paul, “Colony of Ghosts” (2023) from Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025 (MACK, 2025)
Gender poses a captivating paradox in Paul’s work, and all of the writing within the e-book touches on this indirectly, together with her personal. She largely paints ladies, however her personal writing describes how she has at all times been outlined, and determined to be accepted, by males. Unusually, the eponymous portray in Paul’s present present Colony of Ghosts at Victoria Miro Gallery in London depicts males: artists Freud, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, and Michael Andrews. Writing in regards to the portray within the monograph, she says, “I belong among them, even if they can’t let me in.” It’s each an announcement of confidence in her ambition as an artist and a weak admission of her craving to belong. Within the exhibition, “Colony of Ghosts” is hung reverse one in every of Paul’s most up-to-date self-portraits, by which she reclines on a chaise lounge carrying a smock coated in paint splatters, staring all of them down.
Paul has written about herself greater than many artists, however bringing so lots of her works collectively along with her phrases, and people she commissioned others to put in writing about her, evokes a wealthy sense of who she thinks she is — and the way she desires to be perceived. There’s a haunting instability in regards to the picture that emerges, fraught with competing strands of austerity and audacity.
Celia Paul, “Painter Seated in her Studio” (2023) from Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025 (MACK, 2025)
Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025 (2025) is revealed by MACK and is offered on-line and thru impartial booksellers.
