Main Projects is pleased to present The Doors to Your Cage Shall Be Decked with Gold, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Devin Cecil-Wishing. This exhibition marks the artist’s first presentation with the gallery and brings together seven paintings that examine systems of power, material desire, and how value and ownership are constructed.
Working from direct observation, Cecil-Wishing builds each composition through an accumulative process. Fish are sourced from local markets and painted from life in a single sitting, before their physical state begins to deteriorate. Each element is rendered without preparatory sketches or photographic reference, developing sequentially across the canvas.
A single, fully realized form is placed within an otherwise open field, with subsequent elements introduced in response to what is already present.
The artist’s material approach draws from Baroque-era Dutch and Flemish painting. Using historically rooted pigments such as lead white, vermilion, and Naples yellow, Cecil-Wishing works within the material and technical conditions that shaped that tradition, treating process and image as inseparable.
Across the exhibition, fish operate as both subject and structure. Suspended between still life and allegory, they stage relationships between control, accumulation, and exchange.
In Look son, I have long known that the big fish eat the small… (2026), the exhibition’s largest painting, Cecil-Wishing draws on a work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, compressing forms into a dense field where hierarchy is both asserted and destabilized.
The title work, The Doors to Your Cage Shall Be Decked with Gold (2026), presents a pile of treasure interwoven with fish, shifting the terms of ownership. It remains unclear whether the fish are part of the treasure or its owners.
Titles emerge alongside the paintings, often midway through the process as the work comes into focus. Drawn from proverbs, songs, philosophy, and dreams, they are extracted and recontextualized, shifting in meaning as they move into the space of the painting.
Cecil-Wishing’s commitment to building each image entirely by hand, without reliance on photographic or digital tools, situates painting as a material act shaped through time, attention, and direct engagement with the physical world.
A longstanding fascination with fishing underlies the work at a distance. The artist describes it as an act of imagining another world beneath the surface — one that remains present but not fully visible.
Built without a predetermined composition, the paintings unfold through accumulation. Forms gather and press against one another, producing images in which relationships remain unstable and meaning continues to shift.
