Celia Paul is “a person in love with the romance of what can never be”, or at least the critic Hilton Als in a new monograph of his work. This feeling of nostalgia permeates the work of the British painter, collected for the first time in Celia Paul: 1975-2025 workswhich includes five essays, including one of the artist herself. The alternately crisp and disgusting surfaces of Paul's paintings are intensely tactile – they feel like a show of strength or, as she said, “challenge”. Paul called himself a “autobiographer” rather than a painter portrait, and the way in which this book presents the work of his life confirms this title. Her life is concentrated as she returns again and again on the same subjects: the women of her family, the British Museum and the sea.
The book is balanced towards recent works, many dealing with the death of Paul's mother in 2015. Paul painted his sisters in sorrow, on several occasions, and his self -portrait. Paul was one of his own main subjects throughout his career, but she feels that she was unable to paint a real resemblance of herself regularly before the death of her mother.
His two books, Self -portrait (2019) and Letters from Gwen John (2022),, also got out of his sorrow. In a conversation with the English artist Edmund de Waal reprinted in the book, she says that she turned to writing because “painting was not a way of working in this trip of sorrow in the way I needed.” After the publication of Self -portrait, Paul began to receive new types of praise and criticism from his female colleagues. Rachel Cusk wrote a profile her for the New York Times magazinethat Paul felt so strongly was incorrect that she wrote Letters to Gwen John partly as a refutation.
The house, or its absence, is another key theme in Paul's life and this monograph. She was born in India to British missionary parents and moved to England with them at the age of five to live in a succession of vals until she was sent to the boarding school. After starting a relationship with Lucian Freud while a student from the Slade School of Fine Art, he bought an apartment in Bloomsbury directly in front of the British Museum, where she has lived since. Her life is exceptionally ascetic, but she says that “the house” remains a constant source of desire. “Her repetitive painting of herself demonstrates her deep and supported her interest in her place in the world. Now, at 65, she writes in the monograph she realized that” painting me could be at home “.
The genre poses a fascinating paradox in Paul's work, and all the writing of the book touches it in one way or another, including his. She mainly paints women, but her own writing describes how she has always been defined and desperate to be accepted, by men. Unusually, eponymous painting in Paul's current show Ghost colony At the Victoria Miro Gallery in London represents men: the artists Freud, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon and Michael Andrews. Writing on painting in monograph, she says: “I belong to them, even if they cannot let me enter.” It is both a declaration of confidence in his ambition as an artist and a vulnerable admission of his desire to belong. In the exhibition, “Colony of Ghosts” is hung in front of one of Paul's most recent self -portraits, in which she relies on a chair living room with a blouse covered with splashes of paint, looking at them all.
Paul has written more than many artists on herself, but bringing so much of her works with her words, and those she has charged with others to write about her, evokes a rich feeling of who she thinks she is – and how she wants to be perceived. There is obsessive instability on the emerging image, heavy of competitors of austerity and audacity.
Celia Paul: 1975-2025 works (2025) is published by Mack and is available online and via independent booksellers.
