Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, who sadly passed away on April 10, 2026, in Los Angeles, leaves a body of work that feels unfinished in the most profound sense of the word. Interrupted, yet still burning.
From the beginning, Dupuy-Spencer’s artistic vision was one of proximity. Her various subjects - toppled Confederate monuments, the January 6 insurrection, lovers in bed, bodies in states of collapse - were each rendered with unnerving intimacy.
(Main image: Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Self Portrait in the Dark, 2024. Image credit: Photo by Charles White - JW Pictures. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles Oil on linen. 35 × 28 in. (88.9 x 71.1 cm).
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, The Alchemist, the Gospel, the Pillar of Fire (The Showcase), 2024. Image credit: Private Collection. Photo by Charles White - JW Pictures. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles Oil on canvas. 60 × 75 ⅛ in. (152.4 x 190.8 cm)
This collapsing of the walls between the political and personal, the epic and prosaic, was central to her practice. There is no safe vantage point in a Dupuy-Spencer painting. She often began with photographic source material only to, as she frequently described it, “blow it up,” destabilizing perspective, distorting bodies, and compressing space.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Not Today Satan, 2017. Image credit: Photo by Lee Thompson/Flying Studio. Courtesy of the artist Oil on linen. 35 × 28 in. (88.9 × 71.1 cm)
Her dense canvases seemed less painted than grappled into existence. As she told Phaidon.com in 2021: “There is a moment with all of my paintings where it really is me wrestling with material against a surface and I’m pushing and pulling and trying to remember how to make light and shadow and sculpt something. Then there’s often a moment all of a sudden where I make a mark and the canvas’s eye opens up and it’s looking back at me. And I really live for that.”
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, And the Kingdom is Here, 2020. Image credit: Collection of Jeffrey Deitch. Photo by Joshua White - JW Pictures. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles Oil on canvas. 65 × 85 in. (165.1 × 215.9 cm)
The pictorial language that formed her canvases was not always easy to decode, sprung, as it was, from the depths of her subconscious and lived experience. “It’s almost like a spiritual or mystical practice,” she told Phaidon.com in 2021, describing moments when the canvas seemed to look back at her.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, The Time of Angenumenel, 2026. Image credit: Photo by Joshua White - JW Pictures. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles Oil and mixed media on canvas. 40 x 42 in. (101.6 x 106.6 cm)
“Sometimes it’s literally just this other world on the other side. It’s magical. When that happens it makes me think there might actually be a place for painting in my worldview, and that I don’t have to get stumped by the politics of the art world and capitalism. And that, even if I don’t believe in fate, I was put on this earth to do this.”
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, If the Rocks Cry Out in Silence, 2019. Image credit: Photo by Rich Lee. Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery Oil on linen. 47 ⅞ × 40 ⅛ in. (121.6 × 101.9 cm)
It's always tempting, in the wake of an early death, to mythologize the life. In Dupuy-Spencer’s case, the facts are stark enough: addictions in adolescence, including heroin, a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, and a near-fatal unraveling before a return to painting in her mid-thirties.
But what distinguished her was not suffering as narrative, it was how thoroughly she metabolized that personal experience into form. Her paintings enacted, rather than merely illustrated, the trauma of it all.
Celeste Dupuy Spencer - When you’ve eaten everything below you, you’ll devour yourself/except in dreams you’re never really free. (photography Garrett Carroll)
Nowhere is this clearer than in her Artspace edition, When you’ve eaten everything below you, you’ll devour yourself/except in dreams you’re never really free.
The title reads like a prophecy. Talking to Phaidon.com about the work, Dupuy-Spencer described an attempt to capture the foreboding of the present moment: “I was really trying to paint what it feels like to be living in the fall of human civilisation.”
The image, with its spiraling sense of excess and collapse, distils many of her recurring concerns: wealth and ruin, complicity and denial, and the unpleasant proximity between luxury and destruction.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, And the Dawn Don’t Rescue Me No More, 2020. Image credit: Photo by def image. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Paris, London, Marfa Oil on linen. 105 ½ × 97 ½ in. (267 × 247.5 cm)
Just as crucial is the way the work came into being. She spoke of beginning without a plan, allowing the painting to “unfold on its own,” guided by a process that felt almost mystical.
“Obviously every painting is a little bit different, but one of the things that’s important to me as a painter talking about Americans, is that I never want to be standing on the outside of something pointing in, and describing what I think is in it,” she told Phaidon.com.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Father, Don’t You See That I Am Burning, 2021. Image credit: Photo by Dawn Blackman. Courtesy of the artist Oil on canvas. 85 × 85 in. (215.9 × 215.9 cm)
“I really want the viewer to be aware of how they thought they were going to view the painting. For example: with the insurrection painting I did after January 6, on the first look I really want the viewer to think, ‘look at these awful people storming the democratic palace’. But then I want them to be confronted with the way that they are. It’s like old school impressionism, where all of a sudden the viewer is implicated or their view is implicated.”
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, The Death of Hypatia, 2023. Image credit: Collection of Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon. Photo by Joshua White – JW Pictures. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles Oil on linen with mixed media (oyster shells, sculpey, plastic, rubber, etched tin and copper, clay, plasticine). 52 × 42 in. (132.1 × 106.7 cm)
“In the case of the edition image, the viewer is maybe able to feel that they are standing in the righteous place, looking at others with enormous wealth and political ties, tear the world apart while surrounded by bottles of Champagne and art historical pieces," she went on.
"But the question it poses is: what are you going to do when there’s nobody left to blame, or to take all the responsibility? Because the circle is going to get smaller and smaller, and we have to find a place to be at peace with it or just stop doing it.”
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, The Shape of the Rock That’s Hurling Towards the Sea, 2022. Image credit: Photo by Joshua White - JW Pictures. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles Oil on linen, framed. Approx. 114 ⅞ × 210 ¼ in. (291.8 × 534 cm)
Dupuy-Spencer’s working process bordered on the obsessive. She described operating on 26-hour days, with a few hours sleep inbetween, pushing herself into a state of exhaustion so that “different mindsets” could emerge.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Dutchess County Border (Matriarchs of the 90s Line), 2018. Image credit: Photo by Lee Thompson/Flying Studio. Courtesy of the artist. Collection SFMOMA Oil on linen. 96 × 120 in. (243.8 × 304.8 cm)
That to-and-fro swing between critical intention and dreamlike abandon mirrors the push pull within the paintings themselves. Dupuy-Spencer’s figures are rarely stable. They contort, merge, disintegrate. But there is, even in her most violent compositions, a persistent tenderness. A hand rests on a shoulder, a glance is exchanged, even if these moments do not resolve the tension, but intensify it.
In July Monacelli publishes the artist's monograph, Burning in the Eyes of the Maker. Monacelli publisher Holly LaDue said: “Celeste was a fearless painter. Her work is incisive, complex, and unflinching. She tackled our current American moment, mythology (both ancient and contemporary), violence, and poverty, but also deep humanity, intimacy, and kindness.”
As author Nina MacLaughlin writes beautifully in the book’s closing essay: "Celeste paints the right now for the future, so that the someones or somethings in an after-us time can look and understand, this is how it was."
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies Nothing of Him That Doth Fade / But Doth Suffer a Sea-Change / Into Something Rich and Astrange., 2023. Image credit: Courtesy of the artist Oil on linen with mixed media (cigarettes, sculpey, plastic, rubber, etched tin and copper, clay, plasticine). 75 × 60 in. (190.5 × 152.4 cm)
Celeste herself said: “I think of myself as a representation of what it feels like to be alive right now.”
There is a sad poignancy to that statement now. Because what Celeste Dupuy-Spencer captured, so vividly, is not only her time, but ours. And in the uneasy spaces of her paintings, this time will last forever.
