Celeste Dupuy-Spencer at Jeffrey Deitch

Dupuy-Spencer, who died in April at the age of 46,² went on to become a painter with a visual oeuvre that’s archaeological in scope; her paintings are acts of divination that preserve the minutiae of living as recorded history. Yet it’s hardly coincidental that Dupuy-Spencer namechecked Pompeii to explain her longstanding fascination with archaeology. In a recent posthumous exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch, Burning in the Eyes of the Maker, the late artist painted propulsively in the Expressionist tradition, with a color palette of rotting hues, like a pile of rancid fruit. Paralleling the ash and pumice that famously entombed the ancient Southern Italian city, this substantial collection of 36 paintings considered how fire acts as both cleansing agent and catalyst for destruction. At our tense inflection point in human history, Dupuy-Spencer collapsed together threads of myth, history, and fantasy to gesture toward layered questions of human belonging, desire, and harm. Her works make viewers sit with these discomfiting images of chaos rather than looking away.

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Bones (2022). Oil on linen, 75.25 x 60 x 2 inches. Image courtesy of the Estate of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles. Photo: Charles White / JW Pictures.

Dupuy-Spencer once spoke of trying to capture “what it feels like to be living in what really is the fall of human civilization” in her work, which she acknowledged felt somewhat “impossible.”³ But sometimes the vantage point from inside the storm is, if not the clearest view, certainly the most honest. Some of the show’s most outstanding pieces contextualize the rote militarization of everyday life in America, particularly Bones (2022), in which Dupuy-Spencer used a brushy style that imbues choppy emotions into the scene. In it, a young man is being sent off to fight in a civilian militia by his proud parents, presumably the descendants of the Confederate skeleton lying supine on their porch. The elderly couple packs their son’s vest with extra gun clips, while shoving last night’s leftovers into his hand, right before he enters the line of fire alongside others donning familiar red hats. (In the past, Dupuy-Spencer depicted the January 6, 2021 siege on the Capitol, and the encroachment of religious fundamentalism into U.S. politics.⁴) In Back to Where the Start Ended (“A Greeting to You from the Mud”) (2024), Dupuy-Spencer painted a brutal scene of Israeli soldiers marching through Gaza, looking “frazzled and lost” while confronting a larger soldier wielding a flamethrower (which Dupuy-Spencer described as “the giant golem of their past”).⁵ Dupuy-Spencer, who was Jewish, often spoke out against the state of Israel and advocated for Palestinian rights throughout her lifetime. On Instagram, she described the work as an attempt to “envision history as not as a straight line” but rather “a hall of mirrors.” Throughout the exhibition, and particularly in paintings such as this one, Dupuy-Spencer critiques the political machinations that have led to a devastating war, and our world teetering on the edge.

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Back to Where the Start Ended (“A Greeting to You from the Mud”) (2024). Oil on canvas, 60 x 75.25 x 2.25 inches. Image courtesy of the Estate of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles. Photo: Charles White / JW Pictures.

The largest painting in the show, the sprawling The Shape of the Rock That’s Hurling Towards the Sea (2022), situated mythology alongside present-day catastrophes fueled by fire. Across four huge linen panels, Dupuy-Spencer painted kinetic scenes that warp into one another across the canvas. These images subvert the wondrous myth of evolution, devolving instead into a darker and more honest vision that depicts humanity’s propensity for destruction. In the first panel, ancient animals like saber-tooth tigers and dodos, many of them long extinct due in part to the destructiveness of humanity, amble through treacherous landscapes. Medusa, cursed against her will to bear a head of snakes, is seen in the largest second panel with half of her face engulfed by flames—a moment of transformation and, thus, renewal, despite her terrified facial expression. A third panel sees various ships at war amidst choppy seas, a fire sealing at least one’s fate and another’s triumph. Close by, smudged brushstrokes show an armed border patrol agent and a row of people, sitting on the ground by the officer’s car, directly before him as he aims to fire. These juxtapositions allow viewers to confront and draw meaning from the works on their own terms, rather than having Dupuy-Spencer ascribe literal interpretations. Still, an apocalyptic air pervades the scenes she portrays, forcing the viewer to confront various ills and evils while attempting to connect the dots.

Much like the archaeologists that fascinated her as a child, Dupuy-Spencer’s paintings both excavate—questioning what conditions led to our current polycrisis—and document for future generations that may dig through the past. With time, they might be able to determine, definitively, if this moment in America, as immortalized by Dupuy-Spencer, was merely a trial by fire, or fated to smolder until only the ashes remained.

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, The Shape of the Rock That’s Hurling Towards the Sea (2022). Oil on linen, framed, 95 × 210 × 3.5 inches. Image courtesy of the Estate of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles. Photo: Charles White / JW Pictures.