‘My flat – which is directly opposite the British Museum – is also my studio. I’ve never bought any furniture and my flat is nearly empty. I’ve been here since 1982. This is a painting of one of two identical chairs that were given to me by my dearest friends Angus Cook and Jonathan Caplan who live in New York. My studio is in the room next to the one where I sleep. One chair is in the corner of my studio where my models always sit. The other one (this one) is next to my bed – I usually rest my alarm clock on it. My Chair is a self-portrait, really .’ – 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.