“I’m not a portrait painter,” the artist Celia Paul has written. “If I’m anything, I have always been an autobiographer.” Paul, who was born in India in 1959, studied at London’s Slade School of Fine Art. At 18, she met the painter Lucian Freud, a man in his 50s, and they became lovers. Paul was heavily influenced by the “School of London” painters (Freud among them), who were known for their raw depictions of the human condition. Paul takes no portrait commissions. Instead, her haunting paintings fix solely on close family and friends. Paul’s relationship with Freud dominated most of her career. The portraits in her first New York exhibition in over a decade are intimate and inward, the work of a woman who’s not in anyone else’s shadow. —Maggie Turner