Celia Paul has produced a number of evocative self-portraits over the course of her career. Works such as Overshadowed, 2020, open up a painterly and conceptual dialogue between the dual role of subject and artist – caught between self-possession and self-scrutiny – as well as offering an extended consideration of the essential dualities of the medium – its ability to capture qualities of form, light and atmosphere, and its material presence. Vividly portrayed here is Paul’s ‘painting dress’, which in her autobiography Self-Portrait she describes as being ‘now stiff and brittle with dried paint marks and has assumed the texture of hardened papier-mâché.’

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. Self-Portrait is published in the US on 10 November 2020 by New York Review Books. Paul has just finished working with filmmaker Jake Auerbach on a documentary about her life.