In The Gallery, 21 Arran Street East, Dublin 7, D07YY97

Preview: 23 May 6pm - 8pm

Exhibition Run: 24 May - 14 June

Gallery Opening Hours: Monday - Friday 10am - 5pm, Saturday 12pm - 5pm

Lee Welch’s latest exhibition, Oedipus, spans painting, printmaking, and installation, offering a quietly arresting meditation on how we see, remember, and relate. His visual language is spare but loaded figures, gestures, and fragments reduced to essentials that carry emotional weight. With references pulled from art history, popular culture, and the mundane rituals of daily life, Welch distils images into something tender, uneasy, and deeply resonant.

In all silently concentrating (2025), tourists mime holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa rendered in translucent tones on raw-edged polyester, the image resists completion. It’s an illusion about illusions, collective participation in a performance no one quite believes. Nearby, All is vanity (2025) nods to Charles Allan Gilbert’s famous double image of a woman and skull, but Welch’s version trembles in and out of legibility, echoing the instability of perception in the age of deepfakes and visual noise.

The exhibition space itself is interrupted by a sharp architectural intervention, slicing the gallery into competing sightlines. Welch uses this divide to challenge how and from where meaning is constructed, emphasising the viewer’s role in shaping what they see.

Elsewhere, emotion rises to the surface. In epochal defining while one creates beautiful problems (2025), the chess legend Vasyl Ivanchuk is caught mid-defeat, a faded figure on the brink of collapse. For a long time I had wanted (2025) quietly honours composer Arvo Pärt with somber grays and a single red accent, reflecting the stillness and restraint of his music. The works feel intimate but universal, offering space for personal projection.

The quieter paintings thrum with psychological tension. A whole string of failures (2025) shows a figure buried under books a nod to burnout and the paralysis of overthinking. The smallest daily chore can be humanised (2025) captures an empty lilac-tinted interior, saturated with absence. Mindless superstition and pointless ritual (2025), painted on a mover’s blanket, strips away Andy Kaufman’s performative layers to reveal a sense of impermanence. In I’m just going to leave it (2025), Welch isolates a fleeting moment from the Golden Globes: Cillian Murphy’s wife wiping lipstick off his face. It becomes a portrait of care, exposure, and the quiet vulnerability that exists behind public performance.

In aqua seafoam shame (2025), Welch traces a long lineage of artistic influence, working from a Jasper Johns painting of Lucian Freud which itself was based on a John Deakin photograph found in Francis Bacon’s studio. The result is a layered meditation on authorship, image circulation, and emotional inheritance. Similarly, all at once (2025), referencing Paul Atreides from Dune, imagines blindness as another form of insight, asking what it means to see with more than vision.

These are restrained, elliptical works—but their effect is lasting. Welch doesn’t just document a fractured world. He recreates the textures of living in it: the disorientation, the fragility, the fleeting moments of connection that still, somehow, endure. 

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lee Welch (born Louisville, Kentucky) currently lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. He received his BFA from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in 2009 and his MFA from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam in 2011. Welch has held prestigious residencies at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Canada, supported by the Arts Council.

His work has been featured in numerous significant exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including The National Gallery, Dublin; The Glucksman Gallery, Cork; the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University; Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC), Spain; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin; and Objectif, Antwerp.

In 2025, Welch received The Homiens Art Prize in New York and co-founded the arts initiative Hallahan & Welch, which debuted with a significant group exhibition at Dublin Castle's Coach House Gallery.

Welch's works are held in prominent private and public collections such as the Arts Council, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, and the OPW - State Art Collection. His practice has also been recognised in leading art publications, including Artforum, Art Monthly, Frieze, Irish Arts Review, and The Irish Times.

Image "all silently concentrating" by Lee Welch

www.leewelch.com