CELIA PAUL: COLONY OF GHOSTS
Victoria Miro is delighted to present new paintings by Celia Paul. The artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery, Colony of Ghosts coincides with the launch of a major new monograph, published by MACK in March 2025, spanning some fifty years of painting by the artist.
March 14 – April 17, 2025
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.
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.’
The work that gives the exhibition its title, Colony of Ghosts is inspired by John Deakin’s well-known photograph of School of London painters lunching together in Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho in 1963. In Paul’s painting the focus is tightened to four men: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews. It is partly a homage, partly an examination of Paul’s residual anxiety around acceptance into this male club: ‘They represent “home” to me because I belong among them, even if they can’t let me in,’ the artist comments.
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 newfound 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.