Celeste Dupuy-Spencer: But the Clouds Never Hung So Low Before

A panorama of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s unflinching depictions of the human condition

Los Angeles-based Celeste Dupuy-Spencer (born 1979) creates blistering paintings loaded with a complex mix of iconography drawn from the real and the imaginary. At once unflinching and empathic, her compositions can be bleak and troubling, immersive, or simply quite funny: knights in armor going off a cliff; riot police in street combat smiling intoxicatedly through the tear gas; world rulers on a balcony presiding over a cityscape attacked by Death on horseback; a hesitant warrior pondering the meaning of his sacrifice at his kitchen sink. The works offers a fragmented panorama of the human condition in all its contradictions, and yet the narratives do not overwhelm the act of painting itself, compositions that spontaneously grow out of the brushwork. I have no desire to tame the medium, Dupuy-Spencer says. For her, painting is an existential act.