Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts

‘They represent “home” to me because I belong among them, even if they can’t let me in.’
— Celia Paul

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. ‘In my painting, the tablecloth resembles shifting water, or an ectoplasm. The men are looking at me, looking at you, from out of the strange cold land of the dead.’

‘For a female painter to achieve lasting recognition, she needs to succeed on her own’ — Celia Paul

In a companion work, Reclining Painter, the artist lies on a chaise-longue in her Bloomsbury studio, her head turned towards the viewer, her gaze inward. ‘I am thinking of the past,’ she writes, but ‘the paint lives in the present tense, always.’ The contrast of mood between these identically proportioned works, and the dialogue between them, is intentional. The artist writes, ‘A group of male painters is empowered by solidarity; the opposite is true for women. For a female painter to achieve lasting recognition, she needs to succeed on her own.’

‘The third painting was of a tree, almost explosively present…’ — Karl Ove Knausgård

Writing about the experience of seeing Paul’s new paintings for the first time, Karl Ove Knausgård comments, ‘The third painting was of a tree, almost explosively present… I stood for a long time looking at these paintings, which charged one another in such peculiar yet intense ways. They took hold of the room, and they took hold of me… as I write this nearly eight months later, in October, 2024, it is the paintings that I remember, and the feelings they left in me. Of course this is so, because they depicted presence – of the past, of the painter, of the tree – and what you have once been close to stays with you.’

‘In a strange way, the absence of a person reveals another presence, for, though the room is certainly empty, it vibrates with life…’ — Karl Ove Knausgård

Home as a quest and a question is an encompassing theme of the exhibition. The artist writes,  I often feel like a ghost myself. I have lived in this apartment – which is also my studio – since 1982, when I was a young woman of twenty-two, and my memories are more alive than my present existence.’ For Karl Ove Knausgård, however, ‘In a strange way, the absence of a person reveals another presence, for, though the room is certainly empty, it vibrates with life, and it does so because someone sees it, and that someone exists in the painting, in its colours and shapes. Feelings have charged it, and when we look at it the gaze and the feelings, which lie latent in it, are released.’

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.

Together, the works on view 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.

‘Looking at Celia’s images of water – which is to say time shifting – is to recall Walter Sickert’s writing on the subject of nature…’ — Hilton Als

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. Hilton Als notes that ‘Looking at Celia’s images of water – which is to say time shifting – is to recall Walter Sickert’s writing on the subject of nature, that at its best: “fragments of nature at her strangest and loveliest, seen and seduced with the eye of a poet, and executed with the brush of a master, is what we respond to”.’

‘When my four sisters sit for me, there is a particular atmosphere… They are remembering my mother – who had sat with them for me in earlier portraits – and they are remembering their childhood, as well as thoughts about their own children and families.’ — Celia Paul

‘She and I don’t need to use words to know what we are thinking. We communicate with each other at a deeper level.’ — Celia Paul

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. The artist recalls, ‘When my mother was too frail to climb the 80 stairs to my studio, my sister Kate took over as my main sitter. I have painted all four of my sisters: Rosalind (called ‘Mandy’ by her family), Lucy, Jane, Kate. I have painted them individually and together. But the sister who has sat for me most regularly is Kate. She and I don’t need to use words to know what we are thinking. We communicate with each other at a deeper level.’

‘…in my eyes the gaze is filled with distaste, a kind of withheld dismay’ — Karl Ove Knausgård

Ghost of a Girl with an Egg is Paul’s re-encounter with Lucian Freud’s 1980 portrait of her, titled Naked Girl with Egg. Paul writes, ‘I was twenty in 1980 when Lucian painted his portrait of me… I felt vulnerable and exposed and powerless… The young woman with the alarmed eyes and vanquished expression, as depicted by Lucian, bore little resemblance to my inner “I”… In my own painting… my body is surrounded by the swirling black cloth, a sea of dark water on which I am floating. My body is very white. I have turned a meaty representation of flesh into a haunting and spiritual one.’

Karl Ove Knausgård continues, ‘When Paul paints the same motif more than forty years later, the pose is the same, the egg is the same, but the light is nocturnal, the colours pale, clouded. The body is white and ghostly, quite without the original painting’s brutal attention to reality. While the gaze in Freud’s painting is fairly neutral, the gaze in Paul’s painting is not. It appears, rather, to be charged – with what, it is up to the viewer to determine, but in my eyes the gaze is filled with distaste, a kind of withheld dismay… We see Paul’s gaze seeing Freud’s gaze on her.’

‘My recent self-portraits owe their success to the power of my defiance. “I am a survivor” they are clearly saying. I am self-enclosed, as if the paint is my armour.’ — Celia Paul

Several recent self-portraits including Painter at Home were inspired by photographs of the artist taken in her studio in 2021, shortly after the death of her husband, Steven Kupfer, when, as Paul writes, ‘grief had sharpened my perception of my singularity…  My dress, the walls, my slippers, are all splattered with paint. This is the world that I alone have created.’ Paul continues, ‘I want the self-portraits I make from now on to convey a different sort of security. My recent self-portraits – which I am pleased with – owe their success to the power of my defiance. “I am a survivor” they are clearly saying. I am self-enclosed, as if the paint is my armour.’

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.

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Celia Paul was born in 1959 in Trivandrum, India. She lives and works in London. Major solo exhibitions have included Celia Paul, curated by Hilton Als, at Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, USA (2018) travelling to The Huntington, San Marino, California, USA (2019); Desdemona for Celia by Hilton, Gallery Met, New York, USA (2015–2016); Gwen John and Celia Paul: Painters in Parallel, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK (2012–2013); 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 (2024), travelling to MAC Birmingham, UK; Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, UK (2024–2025) and Dundee Contemporary, Scotland, UK (2025); Real Families: Stories of Change, The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK (2023); Joan Didion: What She Means, curated by Hilton Als, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2022–2023); 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); 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 (2015–2016); 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; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK; Frissiras Museum, Athens, Greece; Herzog Ulrich Gallery, Brunswick, Germany; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 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.