‘There’s a beautiful plane tree right outside my window. Behind it, and to the left of the British Museum, the BT Tower rises up like a strange totem pole. Everyone has to rely on the internet and the telephone as never before; I haven’t seen anyone, apart from supermarket staff, for over two months. I Skype with my son and his wife and my four year old granddaughter and one year old grandson every day. I speak on the phone to my husband twice a day and Zoom with my four sisters every Saturday. The BT Tower is a sort of life-line.’ – Celia Paul

Born in 1959 in Trivandrum, India, Celia Paul lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Celia Paul, curated by Hilton Als (Pulitzer Prize-winning author, staff writer and theatre critic for The New Yorker and associate professor of writing at Columbia University), which originated at the Yale Centre for British Art in 2018 and subsequently toured to The Huntington; and Desdemona for Celia by Hilton, at the Gallery Met, New York (2015–16). Paul’s paintings were also included in All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life at Tate Britain, 2018. Last year, the artist published her memoir Self-Portrait, praised by notable critics, including Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books. Paul has recently finished working with filmmaker Jake Auberbach on a documentary about her life.