Jeffrey Deitch presents Burning in the Eyes of the Maker, an exhibition of recent paintings by Celeste Dupuy-Spencer. Originally mounted at Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles gallery in April-May 2026, the project was conceived in close collaboration with the artist and opened shortly after her untimely death at age 46. The exhibition is an overview of the past four years of her work.

The artist statement that follows is adapted from Dupuy-Spencer’s introduction to the new book about her work:

At a certain point, in recent years, I was at a crossroads: stop painting, or find another way to understand what painting actually is—what it can actually do. I decided to turn fully toward painting and away from Art.

The art world likes to talk about power—resistance, critique, progress—but it is an economy first, a social sorting mechanism
second, and only sometimes a meaning-making structure. I didn’t understand at first that my paintings would be structurally
inseparable from that world. Whatever I thought they could be collapsed under the weight of transaction. They became
possessions circulating inside an unregulated market. I learned that attention without ethics is extraction, and that the art world
can reward extraction while calling it insight.

The first works from this shift were religious and mythological paintings. These figures are already cemented in the mind’s eye of the world. The paintings were not attempts at critique or impersonation; they were genuine attempts to reach out, or up. Myth survives because it describes something structurally true about being alive. It is what certain kinds of truth look like once they’ve passed through the human brain.

In the studio, painting became the primary site of meaning. I stopped moving toward an image. There was no final picture waiting to be achieved. A mark was made. The painting answered, and I answered back. The work proceeded as a conversation rather than a construction. Painting became a functional technology guiding me toward a depth otherwise inaccessible—not toward personality or intention, but toward something older and quieter.

The figures that arrive do not behave like symbols. They interrupt. They demand translation. I do not command them or aestheticize them. I listen, or I fail to listen and pay for it. That is the relationship.

Painting, for me, is participation in the aliveness of life. 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.

— Celeste Dupuy-Spencer

About the artist

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer was born in 1979 in New York. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Bard College. Beginning in 2015, she lived and worked in Los Angeles. Her work was featured in major exhibitions including the 2017 Whitney Biennial and Made in L.A 2018 at the Hammer Museum. Dupuy-Spencer’s paintings are held in prominent collections such as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.