A living link to the tail end of the true Bloomsbury aesthetic, Celia Paul is no hallowed relic, but a major artist whose six decades of work continues to display inquisitiveness and perception with a delicacy that is rarely encountered.
Encounter it first-hand from March 2025.
Excerpt from press materials: Celia Paul has always mined complexities of interior and exterior life, looping back and forth through time to the people and places closest to her. It is this highly personal consideration of time, and painting’s unique relationship to it, that underpins her latest body of work. Figures from the artist’s past appear, while the exhibition also features several new self-portraits alongside other cornerstones of Paul’s art – seascapes, paintings of her Bloomsbury studio and family members including a new painting of her four sisters.
Home as a quest and a question is an encompassing theme of the exhibition, while water, representing the eternal, the flow of time, or a sense of bodies becoming dissolute and consciousness shifting to a more elemental plane, is a constant motif – in works such as My Sisters by the Sea, Painter Against Water and The Sea, The Sea. Together, they lend Paul’s work its particular tempo of movement and stasis, while a new-found sense of self-acceptance, even defiance, in Paul’s recent self-portraits suggests that concepts of rootedness and belonging might reside not in a physical place so much as in a state of being, which for Paul lies in the act of painting.
Constancy and change, and how the past is always held in dialogue with the eternal present of the painted image, are, for Paul, inextricably linked to a consideration of self: the immediate self as well as the selves we have been in shadows, mirrors or memories, and the many selves we recognise or perhaps refute in the perception of others. Writing in her forthcoming monograph, the artist comments, ‘My young self and I – we are the same person. I can stretch out my old hand – with its age spots – and hold my young unblemished hand.’
New monograph
Published by MACK in March 2025, this expansive and long-overdue monograph includes new writings on Celia Paul by Hilton Als, Clare Carlisle, Karl Ove Knausgård, Edmund de Waal and Rowan Williams, as well as a new text by Paul herself. Beginning with the earliest works made by Paul at the age of fifteen, this 500-page volume weaves a chronological sequence of work through six decades. Within the rhythms of the book there appear themes and figures that Paul has returned to again and again: her mother, her sisters, the sea, and, crucially, the artist herself. In doing so, these works express the tireless inquisitiveness with which Paul approaches her subjects, and the ways painting offers an understanding of the world around her.
Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts
Exhibition: 14 March – 17 April 2025
Victoria Miro
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
