Ocula Conversation Pierre Huyghe: The Artist as Director Pierre Huyghe is a producer of spectacular and memorable enigmas, with works that function more like mirages than as objects. Abyssal Plain (2015–ongoing), his contribution to the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev , was installed on the seabed of the Marmara Sea, some 20 metres below the surface of the water and...
Ocula Report MoMA Expansion: Once the Modern, Always the Modern 29 Nov 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula In the early decades of its existence, New York 's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, transformed from a philanthropic project modestly housed in a few rooms of the Heckscher Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, to an alleged operating node in the United States' cultural struggle during the cold war, and one of the...
Ocula Insight Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy. Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
Celia Paul’s art stems a deep connection with subject matter and is quiet, contemplative and ultimately moving in its profound attention to detail and deeply-felt spirituality. She makes intimate depictions of people and places she knows well. From 1977 to 2007 Paul 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 close friends. She has also produced a large number of evocative self-portraits over the course of her career. Paul’s self-portraits open up a painterly and conceptual dialogue between the dual role of subject and artist – caught between self-possession and self-scrutiny – as well as offering an extended consideration of the essential dualities of the medium – its ability to capture qualities of form, light and atmosphere, and its material presence.
Read MoreIn addition to her portraits, Paul has made detailed studies of landscapes and interiors, again focusing on the environment she knows best. She has made numerous studies of her studio, and has also painted the central London landmarks visible from its windows, including the British Museum and the BT Tower (previously known as the Post Office Tower). Her seascapes similarly focus on a subject she knows well. During the 1970s, Paul’s father was head of the Lee Abbey religious community in north Devon. Paul returned to this stretch of coastline to make studies for paintings that highlight the painter’s challenge not only to capture specific states of matter – water and air – but to attempt to capture the moment. These paintings are suffused with echoes and resonances of passing time, which in turn points to the poignancy and essential melancholy of the medium. Yet, for Paul, solace can be found in the consoling beauty of nature and in the flow of time that connects us all.
Paul was born in 1959 in Trivandrum, India. She lives and works in London. She has held recent major solo exhibitions including Desdemona for Celia by Hilton at Gallery Met, New York, 2015-16; Gwen John and Celia Paul: Painters in Parallel, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 2012-13; The Grave’s Art Gallery, Sheffield, 2005 and Abbot Hall, Kendal, 2004. She has also participated in group exhibitions including La Diablesse, Tramps, London, 2016; NO MAN’S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Miami, 2015-2016; Forces in Nature curated by Hilton Als at Victoria Miro, 2015; Recent acquisitions: Arcimboldo to Kitaj, British Museum, London, 2013; Self-Consciousness, curated by Peter Doig and Hilton Als, VeneKlasen/Werner gallery, Berlin, 2010; The School of London: Bacon to Bevan, Musée Maillol, Paris, 1998, and British Figurative Painting of the 20th Century, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1992. Her work is in collections including Abbot Hall, Kendal; British Museum, London; Carlsberg Foundation, Copenhagen; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Frissiras Museum, Athens; Herzog Ulrich Gallery, Brunswick, Germany; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Morgan Library and Museum, New York; National Portrait Gallery, London; New Hall Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge; Ruth Borchard Collection; Saatchi Collection, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; and the Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut. Paul will be featured in Tate Britain’s forthcoming major exhibition All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life, 28 February–27 August 2018. In spring 2018, she will be the subject of a solo exhibition, curated by Hilton Als, at Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
Text courtesy Victoria Miro.
Related Press An Artist’s Muse Steps Out of the Shadows With Paintings of Her Own The New York Times : 5 March 2018 After four decades spent in the shadows — as Mr. Freud's partner, as a woman artist and as a figurative painter when the genre was pronounced dead — Ms. Paul, now 58, is drawing attention for her soulful and melancholy portraits. Opening on April 3 at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven is a Celia Paul show curated by the New...
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Related Press A show of over 100 women artists offers redress but no resolution Hyperallergic : 24 January 2016 The exhibition of over 100 women artists currently on view at the Rubell Family Collection is difficult to review because the works do not all fit into the space and the decision was made to rotate them over the course of the show. The plan is to gradually replace some works with others, but because there doesn’t appear to be any overriding...
