Celia Paul

Last updated

Celia Paul (born 11 November 1959) is an Indian-born British painter. Paul's mainly known for her impressionistic work, which she developed during her education at the Slade School of Fine Art. Paul lives and works in London, England.

Contents

Biography

Celia Paul was born on 11 November 1959 in Thiruvananthapuram (formerly called Trivandrum), South India.

From 1976 to 1981 she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she met Lucian Freud who was a visiting tutor and with whom she would have a relationship.

Paul was represented by Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London from 1984 to 1986 and then by Marlborough Fine Art, London from 1989 to 2014. She has been represented by Victoria Miro, London since May 2014. [1]

A solo exhibition of new work by the artist titled Celia Paul: Memory and Desire took place at Victoria Miro in London, 6 April–14 May 2022. The exhibition coincided with the publication of Letters to Gwen John, a new book by the artist published by Jonathan Cape and New York Review Books which centres on a series of letters addressed to the painter Gwen John (1876–1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul.

Paul wrote her autobiography Self-Portrait which was released in 2019 and well-received by national newspapers including The Guardian , The New York Times , and The New York Review of Books .

Style and influences

Celia Paul's paintings are intimate depictions of people and places that she knows well. She does no portrait commissions. Her paintings have a haunting otherworldly feeling. "Throughout all her work the sense of sight is associated with a world of potential, within. This is how a sense of the ineffable is able to be communicated". [2] Paul worked on a series of paintings of her mother from 1977 to 2007 and since then she has concentrated on her four sisters, especially her sister Kate. "…[T]he real strength of Paul's project becomes apparent with time: the concentrated emotional energy of chronicling a family and its subtle shifts over many years". [3] Recently her work has taken a new direction and she has been focusing on landscape and the sea. "[S]he …is a creator of subterranean images. Her canvases are Impressionism in conversation with modernism- objective but felt". [4]

Paul lives and works in her studio which is directly opposite the main gates of the British Museum. [5]

Personal life

From the age of 18 to 28, Paul was in a romantic relationship with Lucian Freud. [5] She has a son by him, Frank Paul (born 10 December 1984), who is also an artist. Spouse, Steven Kupfer (married 2011 - 2021).

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions

Films and interviews

Public collections

British Museum, London; National Portrait Gallery, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Saatchi Collection, London; Abbot Hall, Kendal; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut; Carlsberg Foundation, Copenhagen; Frissiras Museum, Athens; Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick, Germany; Morgan Library , New York; New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge

Further reading

The Muse at her Easel; Zadie Smith; 21 November 2019, New York Review of Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frank Auerbach</span> German-British painter

Frank Helmut Auerbach is a German-British painter. Born in Germany, he has been a naturalised British subject since 1947. He is considered one of the leading names in the School of London, with fellow artists Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucian Freud</span> British painter and engraver

Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths' College, London. He served at sea with the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War.

Bill Brandt was a British photographer and photojournalist. Born in Germany, Brandt moved to England, where he became known for his images of British society for such magazines as Lilliput and Picture Post; later he made distorted nudes, portraits of famous artists and landscapes. He is widely considered to be one of the most important British photographers of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victoria Miro Gallery</span> Contemporary art gallery in London, England

The Victoria Miro Gallery is a British contemporary art gallery in London, run by Victoria Miro. Miro opened her first gallery in 1985 in Cork Street, before moving to larger premises in Islington in 2000 and later opening a second space in St George Street, Mayfair.

Anthony David Bernard Sylvester was a British art critic and curator. Although he received no formal education in the arts, during his long career he was influential in promoting modern artists, in particular Francis Bacon, Joan Miró, and Lucian Freud.

Janine Burke is an Australian author, art historian, biographer, novelist and photographer. She also curates exhibitions of historical and contemporary art. She is Honorary Senior Fellow, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. She was born in Melbourne in 1952.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Coldwell</span> English artist

Paul V Coldwell is an English artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane McAdam Freud</span> British conceptual sculptor (1958–2022)

Jane McAdam Freud was a British conceptual sculptor working in installation art and digital media. She was the winner of the 2014 European Trebbia Awards for artistic achievement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bettina Shaw-Lawrence</span> English painter

Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, also known as Betty Shaw-Lawrence, was an English figurative artist. Shaw studied painting and drawing under Fernand Léger, Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, though she was mainly self-taught and worked professionally until the early 1980s.

Suling Wang is an internationally recognized painter and contemporary artist, known predominantly for her large scale abstract works. She currently lives and works in London, UK and Taichung, Taiwan.

Hilton Als is an American writer and theater critic. He is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of writing at Columbia University and a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker. He is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and former editor-at-large at Vibe magazine.

Tony Bevan is a British painter, known for his psychologically charged images of people at the edge of respectable society.

David Dawson is a British artist, born near Pwllheli, North Wales.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marlborough Fine Art</span>

Marlborough Fine Art was founded in London in 1946 by Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer. In 1963, a gallery was opened as Marlborough-Gerson in Manhattan, New York, at the Fuller Building on Madison Avenue and 57th Street, which later relocated in 1971 to its present location, 40 West 57th Street. The gallery operates another New York space on West 25th Street, which opened in 2007. It briefly opened a Lower East Side space on Broome Street.

<i>Portrait of Kitty</i> Painting by Lucian Freud

Portrait of Kitty is a painting by Lucian Freud of Kitty Garman, his wife and the eldest daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and Kathleen Garman. Completed between 1948 and 1949, this oil on board measures 35 by 24 centimetres.

Harry Diamond was a photographer known for his photographs of artists, jazz musicians, and the East End of London. He was born and worked in London.

Bettina von Zwehl is a German artist who lives and works in London. She has centred her artistic practice on photography, installation and archival exploration evolving through artist-residencies in museums. Her work explores representations of the human condition and human concerns through an observational approach combined with a distinctive use of the profile view and silhouette that continues to underpin her practice.

Pilar Ordovas is an art gallery owner who founded her gallery in 2011. She exhibits and deals in 20th-century and contemporary art, presenting a programme of museum-quality shows in London and in New York.

Celia Frances Bedford was a British artist, notable for her portrait and figure paintings plus her work as a lithographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Giovanni Aloi</span> Italian art historian

Giovanni Aloi is an author and curator specializing in the representation of nature in modern and contemporary art. He teaches art history and visual culture at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and is the co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press book series Art after Nature. Aloi is also USA correspondent for Esse Magazine Art+Opinion.

References

  1. "Victoria Miro – Artists".
  2. Angus Cook, Introduction to Celia Paul: Recent Work at Marlborough Fine Art, October 1991
  3. Jackie Wullschlager: Financial Times, 6 July 2014
  4. "Letter from London: Celia Paul and Henri Matisse". The New Yorker . 28 July 2014.
  5. 1 2 Parker, Dian (6 March 2024). "'I Am No Longer Anyone's Model': Celia Paul on Why She Chose Art Over Love". Artnet News. Retrieved 9 March 2024.