Celia Paul's colony of ghostly apparitions haunts Victoria Miro

‘I often feel like a ghost… my memories are more alive than my present existence,’ writes Celia Paul in her latest monograph. It is a striking statement given the apparitional nature of her work in Victoria Miro’s current exhibition, ‘Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts’. At every turn, Paul’s beautifully pared-down portraits haunt the walls and the viewer alike. Whether of figures or seascapes, profiles or trees, her paintings exude the knowledge of things past lingering into the present. These ghostly works speak, rather eerily and elegiacally, into the here and now.

Yet portraiture, for Paul, is also a speculative, as well as spectral, process. New works look back to former paintings, and more recent auto-portraits reference older ones by other British artists. In Ghost of a Girl with an Egg (2023), a woman looms luminous and lavish, her pearlescent flesh shimmering against the dark depths of a bed. A halved egg, the baby yellow yolk of which subtly gleams, appears pallid next to the woman’s lunar lustre. What takes one’s breath away about this mesmerising work is that Paul is here referencing Lucian Freud’s past portrait (Naked Girl with Egg, 1980-81) of her as a young woman. In her painting, Paul not only transforms ‘flesh’ into ‘spirit’, but answers back to Freud’s representation of her, to the male gaze, to a past self that deserved to shine rather than exist in the shadow of her famous lover.

The exhibition’s titular work performs this divine feat of painterly justice too. Past haunts the present, but only so Paul can now stare long and hard into the issues of yesterday. Featuring the ‘four giants of the so-called School of London: Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews’, as Paul describes them, Colony of Ghosts (2023) appears like a supernatural summoning, with this recognisable artistic quartet stark in an enclosed scene. Standing before them one wonders who is subject to whom? But if we turn our eyes to the painting on the opposite wall (Reclining Painter, 2023), it is Paul’s reclining yet directly attuned form we – and they – behold. It is Paul’s gaze and superior sense of interiority pouring out before us that claims our utmost attention.

As defiant as her auto-portraits are, Paul’s canvases are suffused with emotion, so much so that figures are bent over in tears, their plaintive positions echoed in their very titles. In Weeping Muse (2024), a figure clad in the purest of whites weeps like a votary before a saint, cleansed by her lachrymose act. In Weeping Muse and Running Tap (2024), an enrobed figure dissolves into the hot heaviness of her lamentation. Across the works, Paul’s translucent veils of paint balanced with the tremors of thicker impasto stir and enthral the viewer, conveying her grief in the very texture and composition of the paint. Ethereal in essence, but forceful in form, ‘Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts’ moves and awes in equal measure; it recalls the past only to reinvigorate the present with timeless visions.

‘Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts’ is on show at Victoria Miro, London, until 17 April 2025. An accompanying monograph, Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025 is published by MACK and also available from Waterstones

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