CELIA PAUL

Accompanied by a reading and a personal selection of extracts from the book, which is published by New York Review Books on 10 November 2020, this online presentation features the enduring and widely celebrated subject and motifs of Paul’s art: self-portraiture, paintings of those closest to her, including her husband Steven Kupfer, her home and studio, sky and seascapes. It underscores the deep connections—familial, creative, looping back and forth across time—to people and places on which her work is founded and highlights her career-long enquiry into the complexities of interior and exterior life, constancy and change.

Reviewing Self-Portrait in The Times, Michael Prodger commented, ‘Her painting and writing are of a piece—closely observed, not seeking to flatter, and with people always as her focus.’ Viewing Paul’s painting and writing in tandem echoes the unique qualities of Self-Portrait, in which Paul moves effortlessly through time in words and images, folding in her past and present selves—from her move to the Slade School of Fine Art at sixteen, through a profound and intense affair with the older and better-known artist Lucian Freud, to the practices of her present-day studio. It is a story described by Zadie Smith in an extended consideration of Self-Portrait published in the New York Review of Books, as ‘striking. It is not, as has been assumed, the tale of a muse who later became a painter, but an account of a painter who, for ten years of her early life, found herself mistaken for a muse...’

The exhibition is also available to view via the App Store on Vortic Collect