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28 October-09 December 2023

Celia Paul: Myself, Among Others

venice

Introduction

Victoria Miro is delighted to present Myself, Among Others, an exhibition of new paintings by Celia Paul completed during a recent residency with the gallery in Venice. The exhibition is accompanied by a new text by Eleanor Nairne.

‘Venice is full of memory – my own memories, everyone’s memories. Nothing has changed since the time Proust visited Venice with his mother – later transforming the visit into the chapter in the fifth book of In Search of Lost Time, titled Sojourn in Venice. It is a heartbreaking passage. Both he and his mother are grieving for lost loved ones. The grief washes through his experience of being in Venice, just as the water of the canals washes constantly through and against the decaying grandeur of the buildings.’ – Celia Paul

Celia Paul’s art is founded on deep connections – familial, creative, looping back and forth across time – to people and places, often finding in literature and art history tutelary spirits that resonate with her career-long enquiry into the complexities of interior and exterior life, constancy and change.

Against a backdrop of Venice, a city where liquid and solid, past and present, art and actuality, are held in fragile balance, the essential themes of Paul’s work, its focus on memory and mortality, and the formation of self as part of a broader continuum of creative expression, assume extraordinary resonance.

Proust was a constant presence during the artist’s recent stay in the city. So too were the Venetian masters Tintoretto, Giorgione and Carpaccio. Giorgione’s beguiling work La Tempesta, 1506–1508, on view in the Accademia, is a touchstone in Paul’s painting That Obscure Object of Desire, in which she delves into the painting’s strange aura of eroticism and vulnerability in its depiction of mother and child, and the feelings she herself experienced as a young single mother. Struck by Carpaccio’s The Visitation, 1504–1506, seen in the Museo Correr, depicting the Virgin Mary embracing her elderly cousin Elizabeth, Paul responded with Old Woman Embracing Her Young Self, in which the same figure offers support and is consoled across time. Shown alongside and expanding on the theme of life captured at various stages are portraits of young women, Pia, Lola and Clem.

The exhibition’s shifting relationship to time is underscored by a still life capturing the incandescently short lifespan of a peony as it sheds its petals, while depictions of Venice, the light on the water seen from Paul’s studio in a trio of Laguna paintings, are completed in different conditions as spring progresses to early summer.

One might think of Paul’s paintings as portals through which we are invited to enter the inner world of the artist. She describes Venice as ‘the most beautiful place in the world. Everything is centred around beauty. The light, the art, the water, the architecture’, yet she concedes that ‘It can feel overwhelming.’ It is this feeling she distils in her self-portrait Overwhelmed by Beauty. Her hand is placed on her heart, while the dawn glow that suffuses the work suggests that this might be an inner light as much as an actual one. Equally, it might be the light of others, past and present, illuminating the ways in which one is seen or comes to see oneself.

As Eleanor Nairne writes in an accompanying text: ‘These are paintings that grow from the soil of your immediate self, but also stem from your many shadow selves that appear sometimes unbidden. They relate to the conundrum by which we can only ever really know ourselves through how we are known to others...’

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Works

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Celia Paul

Celia Paul

Celia Paul mines complexities of interior and exterior life, looping back and forth through time to the people and places closest to her. From 1977 to 2007 she worked on a series of paintings of her mother, and since then she has concentrated on painting her four sisters, especially her sister Kate, as well as a number of portraits of other family members and close friends. She has also produced a large number of evocative self-portraits over the course of her career. 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.

Further cornerstones of Paul’s art include seascapes and depictions of her home and studio. Home as a quest and a question is an encompassing theme, 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 an enduring motif. 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.

About the Artist

?Celia Paul was born in 1959 in Trivandrum, India. She lives and works in London.

Major solo exhibitions include Celia Paul, curated by Hilton Als, at Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, USA (2018) touring to The Huntington, San Marino, California, USA (2019); Desdemona for Celia by Hilton, Gallery Met, New York, USA (2015–16); Gwen John and Celia Paul: Painters in Parallel, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK (2012–13); The Grave’s Art Gallery, Sheffield, UK (2005) and Abbot Hall, Kendal, UK (2004).

The artist’s work has been featured in group exhibitions including Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK, travelling to MAC Birmingham, UK; Millenium Gallery, Sheffield, UK; Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA), UK (2025); Real Families: Stories of Change, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK (2023–24); Joan Didion: What She Means, curated by Hilton Als, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2022–23); Pictus Porrectus; Reconsidering the Full-Length Portrait, Bell House, Newport, Rhode Island, USA (2022); Me, Myself, I – Artists’ Self-Portraits, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, UK (2022); Works on Paper, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen, Denmark (2019); All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life, Tate Britain, London, UK (2018); La Diablesse, Tramps, London, UK (2016); NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA (2015–16); Forces in Nature curated by Hilton Als at Victoria Miro, London, UK (2015); Recent acquisitions: Arcimboldo to Kitaj, British Museum, London, UK (2013); Self-Consciousness, curated by Peter Doig and Hilton Als, VeneKlasen/Werner gallery, Berlin, Germany (2010); The School of London: Bacon to Bevan, Musée Maillol, Paris, France (1998) and British Figurative Painting of the 20th Century, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel (1992).

Her work is in collections including Abbot Hall, Kendal, UK; British Museum, London, UK; Carlsberg Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark; The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK; Frissiras Museum, Athens, Greece; Herzog Ulrich Gallery, Brunswick, Germany; Metropolitan Museum, New York, USA; Morgan Library and Museum, New York, USA; National Portrait Gallery, London, UK; New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, UK; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA; Ruth Borchard Collection, London, UK; Saatchi Collection, London, UK; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; and the Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut, USA.

In 2022, a solo exhibition of new works – Memory and Desire – was held at Victoria Miro, London, UK to coincide with the publication of Letters to Gwen John, a Jonathan Cape book by the artist which centres on a series of letters addressed to the painter Gwen John (1876–1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. The artist’s first book, Self-Portrait, was published in 2019. Also in 2019, Celia Paul was awarded Harper’s Bazaar Artist of the Year.

The monograph Celia Paul: Works 1975-2025 was published by MACK in 2025. Beginning with the earliest works made by Paul at the age of fifteen, this extensive 500-page volume weaves a chronological sequence of work through six decades, and includes writing by Hilton Als, Clare Carlisle, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Rowan Williams, as well as a new text by Paul herself.

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