Work of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer ’08 on View in New York through Saturday
An installation image of Burning in the Eyes of the Maker at Jeffrey Deitch.
The paintings of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer ’08 were of a wide subject matter, including intimate portraits pulled from everyday life alongside depictions of political violence and protest in the Trump Era. Her celebrated seven-foot-square work Don’t You See That I Am Burning reimagined the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol (and was later acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.) Regardless of the subject, Dupuy-Spencer applied a raw, expressionistic style to create paintings teeming with life. She credited her time at Bard—and the tuttelage of professors Nicole Eisenman and Amy Sillman MFA ’95—for the development of her style and point of view.
Dupuy-Spencer died earlier this year at the age of 46, days before her exhibition Burning in the Eyes of the Maker opened at the Los Angeles gallery of dealer Jeffrey Deitch. Presenting an overview of work from the past four years, the exhibition was conceived in close collaboration between Dupuy-Spencer and Deitch. It has since traveled to the gallerist’s New York location on Grand Street, where it remains on view free to the public through Saturday, October 31.
“Painting, for me, is participation in the aliveness of life,” the artist said in her statement for the show. “It is communication as recognition, not explanation. Meaning emerges only through encounter—when a viewer and a painting agree to stand in the same place and face the same uncertainty. The task is contact.”
Post Date: 10-29-2026
Dupuy-Spencer died earlier this year at the age of 46, days before her exhibition Burning in the Eyes of the Maker opened at the Los Angeles gallery of dealer Jeffrey Deitch. Presenting an overview of work from the past four years, the exhibition was conceived in close collaboration between Dupuy-Spencer and Deitch. It has since traveled to the gallerist’s New York location on Grand Street, where it remains on view free to the public through Saturday, October 31.
“Painting, for me, is participation in the aliveness of life,” the artist said in her statement for the show. “It is communication as recognition, not explanation. Meaning emerges only through encounter—when a viewer and a painting agree to stand in the same place and face the same uncertainty. The task is contact.”
Post Date: 10-29-2026