Like her seascapes, Paul’s paintings of the sky highlight the artist’s challenge not only to capture specific states of matter but to attempt to capture the moment. Writing about the recent sky paintings on view, she notes, ‘Throughout this spring and summer the weather has been extraordinarily beautiful – day after day of sunshine; the poignant beauty of the weather will always be associated with the first months of the pandemic, in my mind. Living and working alone, as I do, in Central London, I read a sign of hope in the blue skies and the flying birds that I can see from my studio window.’

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.