The Wick List

Viewing Celia Paul at Victoria Miro Gallery

The Wick Culture - Celia Paul, Painter at Home, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Above Celia Paul, Painter at Home, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

The Wick Culture - Celia Paul, Reclining Painter, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Above Celia Paul, Reclining Painter, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

The Wick Culture - Celia Paul, Colony of Ghosts, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Above Celia Paul, Colony of Ghosts, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Above Celia Paul, Painter at Home, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Above Celia Paul, Reclining Painter, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Above Celia Paul, Colony of Ghosts, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro

Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts

Victoria Miro Gallery
14 March – 17 April 2025

Celia Paul’s eighth solo exhibition at Victoria Miro opens this week, and later this month, an expansive new monograph on the artist will be published by MACK to coincide, celebrating five decades of Paul’s riveting, profound and stirring paintings of the complexities of life through people she cherishes. This show focuses on the inevitable passing of time, and Paul’s relationship to it, through painting.

There are new self-portraits, as well as a poignant portrait of her four sisters, as well as sumptuous new seascapes, and paintings of the artist’s Bloomsbury studio. Figures who appear at times are plucked from Paul’s past as she reflects on the years, on what has changed – and what hasn’t – what can be captured in paint, and what slips away.

Shifting in atmosphere, many of the paintings are imbued with a certain kind of melancholy and feeling of solitude, and inevitably grief, as the artist looks at her world and considers the death of her husband, in 2021, and her own ageing. In her forthcoming monograph, which includes new essays by Hilton Als, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Edmund de Waal, among others, the artist writes: ‘My young self and I – we are the same person. I can stretch out my old hand – with its age spots – and hold my young unblemished hand.’