Celia Paul is “a person who is in love with the romance of that what can never be,” says critic Hilton as in a new monograph of her work. That feeling of nostalgia penetrates the oeuvre of the British painter, collected for the first time Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025Including five essays, including one of the artist himself. The alternative crispy and dripping surfaces of Paul’s paintings are intense tactile – they feel like a show of strength or, as she said, ‘defiance’. Paul has called himself an “autobiographer” instead of a portrait painter, and the way in which this book presents its life’s work, confirms that title. Her life comes into the picture when she keeps returning to the same subjects: the women in her family, the British Museum and the Sea.
The book is weighed in the direction of recent works, many who have to deal with the death of Paul’s mother in 2015. Paul repeatedly painted her sisters in grief, and her self -portrait time and time again. During her career, Paul was one of her own main subjects, but she feels that she was unable to consistently paint a real parable of herself until after the death of her mother.
Her two books, Self -portrait (2019) and Letters from Gwen John (2022)” Also came from her grief. In a conversation with the English artist Edmund de Waal reprinted in the book, she says she turned to write because “painting was not a way to go through this journey of grief in the way I had to.” After the publication of Self -portrait, Paul started to receive new types of praise and criticism from co -women. Rachel Cusk wrote a profile from her for the New York Times Magazineof which Paul felt so strong that she was incorrect that she wrote Letters to Gwen John partly as a refutation.
Home, or the lack thereof, is another important theme during the life of Paul and this monograph. She was born in India from British missionary parents and moved with them to England at the age of five to live in a succession of Vicaragen until she was sent to the boarding school. After he started a relationship with Lucian Freud, while he bought a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, he bought her a flat in Bloomsbury directly opposite the British Museum, where she has been living since then. Her life is exceptionally ascetic, but she says that “at home” remains a consistent source of desire. ” Her repetitive painting of herself shows her in -depth, persistent interest in her place in the world. Now, at the age of 65, she writes in the monograph that she has realized that “painting myself might be when coming home.”
Gender is a fascinating paradox in the work of Paul, and all writing in the book touches here in one way or another, including her own. She usually paints women, but her own writing describes how she is always defined and desperately accepted by men. Unusual, the painting of the same name in the current show of Paulus Colony of spirits In Victoria Miro Gallery in London, men show: artists Freud, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon and Michael Andrews. She writes about the painting in the monograph, says, “I belong, even if they can’t let me in.” It is both a statement of trust in her ambition and artist and a vulnerable recognition of her desire to belong. In the exhibition, “Colony of Ghosts” hangs opposite one of Paul’s most recent self -portraits, in which she leans back on a chaise lounge with a tube covered with paint splashes, staring them all down.
Paul has written more about himself than many artists, but bringing so many of her works together with her words, and those she instructed others to write about her evokes a rich feeling of who she thinks she is – and how she wants to be observed. There is a spooky instability about the image that emerges, loaded with competing strands of austerity and courage.
Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025 (2025) is published by Mack and is available online and through independent booksellers.
