Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, a painter hailed as a rising star for her haunting, hotly topical canvases that examined economic inequality and the power structure of America, along with the chasm-wide cultural divisions of the Trump era, died on April 9 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 46.
Her death was confirmed by the Jeffrey Deitch gallery, which is opening an exhibition of her work in Los Angeles on Saturday. The gallery did not provide a cause.
Ms. Dupuy-Spencer established herself as an artist to watch after her work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial in New York and in the “Made in L.A.” biennial at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles the next year. Anne Ellegood, a curator of the Hammer exhibition, told Elle magazine in 2018 that Ms. Dupuy-Spencer was on track to becoming “one of the great painters of her generation.”
Her vibrant yet brooding work channeled the raw expressionism of early influences like the portraitists Egon Schiele and Alice Neel. Ms. Dupuy-Spencer, a self-described Marxist, was best known for her unflinching gaze at the nation’s combustible political climate, which earned her a reputation for “painting the news,” as Los Angeles Magazine put it in 2021.
“Durham, Aug. 14, 2017” portrayed the aftermath of a protest in that North Carolina city a few days after the violent, white-nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. Painted in the months that followed, Ms. Dupuy-Spencer’s work shows the mangled remains of a Confederate monument at the feet of the protesters who toppled it.
But while animated by a fierce sense of social justice, Ms. Dupuy-Spencer wasn’t stridently partisan, and her works included sympathetic portraits of the white working class. She “has a skill for impassioned political commentary absent simplistic posturing,” Christopher Knight wrote in a 2018 review for The Los Angeles Times, “something exceedingly rare in art today.”
She also mined the personal, as in her 2017 painting “Sarah,” an intimate, unvarnished depiction of the artist, topless and unkempt, lying serenely in the arms of her naked girlfriend in a sun-dappled apartment.
Her brutal tour de force was “Don’t You See That I Am Burning,” a seven-foot-square rendering of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. That painting, which drew comparisons to Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of hell, depicts a teeming mob of self-described patriots — some in tactical gear, others hoisting Confederate flags — gathering to storm the nation’s domed bastion of democracy in an effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
“We’re going through a moment right now,” she later said in an interview with Phaidon, the art book publisher, “where we’re pretty much top to bottom psychopathic.”
Celeste Thais Dupuy-Spencer was born on Dec. 22, 1979, in Manhattan, the older of two children of Scott Spencer, the author of more than a dozen novels, including “Endless Love” (1979), and a longtime champion of left-wing causes, and Coco Dupuy, a visual artist descended from an illustrious New Orleans family.
The family moved to Rhinebeck, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley, when Celeste was 3. Her parents divorced a decade later, around the time she realized that she was gay. Mired in adolescent angst, she began using alcohol and drugs, eventually turning to heroin.
“I don’t want to give the impression that I was a wild party kid,” Ms. Dupuy-Spencer told Los Angeles Magazine in 2021. “I wished I had that kind of freedom. But there was something self-destructive about how I did it.”
After high school, she briefly studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before returning to Rhinebeck, where she worked as a landscaper and enrolled at Bard College, in nearby Annandale-on-Hudson, to study art.
Personal and financial troubles mounted, but eventually two of her instructors — the celebrated painters Amy Sillman and Nicole Eisenman — pulled her aside and told her, as she recalled: “You’re a really good painter, and you’re queer and you’re a feminist. It’s your responsibility to take this seriously.”
Though she often said that she had no preference about the pronouns used to describe her, and was typically referred to as “she” and “her” professionally, Ms. Dupuy-Spencer underwent an evolving gender journey over the years.
“I definitely do not identify with being a woman,” she told Los Angeles Magazine in 2021. “I’m trans, masculine presenting.”
But also, she added, “I don’t consider myself transitioning to male.”
Ms. Dupuy-Spencer left Bard and moved to New York City, where she became part of a circle of L.G.B.T.Q.+ artists and began to exhibit in group shows. Even so, it took a long time to get her career fully on track. She continued to battle addiction. At 28, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and, later, with autism.
She finally established a real foothold in the art world after settling in Los Angeles in 2015. That year, she had her first solo exhibition, at the Artist Curated Projects gallery. She drew raves for a 2018 show at Nino Mier Gallery in which she explored religious fundamentalism.
In addition to her parents, she is survived by her brother, Asher Dupuy-Spencer, the publisher of Jacobin, the socialist magazine.
Ms. Dupuy-Spencer acknowledged the contradiction inherent in her choice of the insular, big-money art world as a platform for exploring, among other topics, the lives of the country’s have-nots, whose annual incomes might fall well short of the price of a single painting.
“It’s hard,” she once put it, “to be a Marxist in the art world.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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