At Jeffrey Deitch in New York, a posthumous presentation of recent paintings reveals an artist turning toward religious imagery, mythology, and the uncertain space between personal experience and collective belief.
What can painting do when an image is no longer enough?
For Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, that question became increasingly urgent in the final years of her life. Rather than treating painting as a means of illustrating an idea or delivering a fixed message, she began to approach it as a process of encounter—an exchange between the artist, the emerging image, and something that could not be fully explained.
That shift is at the center of Burning in the Eyes of the Maker, an exhibition of recent paintings at Jeffrey Deitch, 76 Grand Street, New York. On view from September 12 through October 31, 2026, the presentation surveys approximately four years of work and was conceived in close collaboration with the artist. It opened shortly after Dupuy-Spencer’s death at age 46.
The exhibition is not simply a retrospective gesture. It offers a view of an artist in the midst of a significant change in direction—one that brought religious and mythological figures into a practice already known for its searching portrayals of American life.
Turning Away from the Art World
Dupuy-Spencer’s paintings have often engaged with the contradictions of contemporary America: political division, identity, faith, violence, and the uneasy relationship between private experience and public life.
In the artist statement accompanying the exhibition, she described reaching a crossroads. She could stop painting, she wrote, or find another way to understand what painting itself could do. Her decision was to turn fully toward painting and away from “Art”—a distinction that questioned the art world’s economic and social systems.
She reflected on how paintings can become possessions circulating through a market, and how attention without ethical responsibility can become a form of extraction. The statement offers an unusually direct account of the tension between making art and participating in the institutions that give it value.
The new work did not abandon the world around her. Instead, it sought another way to approach it.
Myth as a Living Language
Religious and mythological imagery became increasingly important in Dupuy-Spencer’s later paintings.
These figures, she suggested, were already deeply embedded in collective visual memory. Her aim was not simply to critique them or reproduce familiar iconography. She described the paintings as genuine attempts to reach toward something beyond the immediate self.
For Dupuy-Spencer, myth endured because it could express structural truths about being alive. It offered a language through which complicated human experiences—fear, longing, devotion, mortality, and uncertainty—could take visual form.
This approach gives the exhibition a different atmosphere from a conventional survey of contemporary American life. The paintings move toward symbolic and spiritual territory, but they resist becoming illustrations with one clear interpretation.
The figures arrive, in the artist’s words, as presences that interrupt and demand translation. They are not symbols to be controlled. They are encounters to which the painter must respond.
The Painting as Conversation
The exhibition’s central idea may be found in Dupuy-Spencer’s description of her studio process.
She wrote that she no longer moved toward a predetermined image. Instead, a mark was made, the painting answered, and she answered in return. The work proceeded as a conversation rather than a construction.
That description is important because it shifts attention away from the finished composition as a solved problem.
Painting becomes an unfolding relationship.
A figure may emerge without being fully anticipated. A gesture may change the direction of the work. An image may resist the artist’s intention and require a different kind of attention.
This does not mean the paintings are without structure. Rather, their structure develops through the process of making.
The artist’s statement describes painting as a way of reaching a depth that is difficult to access through personality or intention alone—a process guided by something “older and quieter.”
American Life, Faith, and Contradiction
Dupuy-Spencer’s broader practice was rooted in the specific textures of American life. Her paintings often combined personal observation with wider histories, allowing intimate scenes to carry political, cultural, or spiritual weight.
The new religious and mythological works extend that interest rather than leaving it behind.
American identity has long been shaped by competing beliefs: individual freedom and collective responsibility, secular life and religious conviction, historical memory and national mythology. Dupuy-Spencer’s turn toward myth offered a way to consider these tensions without reducing them to a single argument.
Her paintings invite viewers to remain with contradiction.
A religious figure may suggest comfort, but also uncertainty. A mythological reference may feel familiar, yet its presence in a contemporary painting can make it strange again. The image may carry a history beyond the artist’s own experience, while still becoming intensely personal through the act of painting.
That openness is central to the exhibition’s emotional register.
A Career of Public Encounters
Born in New York in 1979, Dupuy-Spencer studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Bard College. Beginning in 2015, she lived and worked in Los Angeles. Her work appeared in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and Made in L.A. 2018 at the Hammer Museum. Her paintings are held in collections including the Hammer Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, LACMA, SFMOMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
These exhibitions placed her work within conversations about contemporary American painting and its capacity to address political and social realities.
Burning in the Eyes of the Maker adds another dimension to that history. It shows an artist reconsidering not only what she painted, but what painting could mean as a practice.
The exhibition’s title is also shared by Dupuy-Spencer’s first full-length monograph, published by Monacelli in June 2026. Conceived and developed by the artist, the book spans a decade of work and includes a text by writer Nina MacLaughlin.
The book and exhibition together provide two related ways of encountering the artist’s work: one through a broader selection of paintings, the other through a focused view of her recent development.
After the Artist
The posthumous context inevitably changes how the exhibition is experienced. Yet it is important not to reduce the paintings to a final statement or treat them as a complete explanation of the artist’s life.
The works remain open-ended.
They ask viewers to encounter images without immediately converting them into conclusions. That invitation is consistent with Dupuy-Spencer’s own understanding of painting as communication through recognition rather than explanation.
Her statement ends with a concise description of the task: contact.
The word suggests something more immediate than interpretation. It asks the viewer to stand before a painting, share its uncertainty, and remain present long enough for meaning to emerge.
At Jeffrey Deitch, Burning in the Eyes of the Maker offers an opportunity to encounter that process across a body of recent work. The paintings do not settle the questions that animated them. Instead, they preserve the artist’s effort to reach beyond the limits of a fixed image.
In that sense, the exhibition is not only about what Dupuy-Spencer painted.
It is about the kind of attention she believed painting could make possible.
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer: Burning in the Eyes of the Maker is on view at Jeffrey Deitch, 76 Grand Street, New York, through October 31, 2026. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m.
