Celeste Dupuy-Spencer: But the Clouds Never Hung So Low Before (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9783947127290)

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.