all silently concentrating, 2025
acrylic on polyester
180 x 140 cm / 70.9 x 55.1 in
In all silently concentrating (2025) depicts tourists in the familiar, mimed act of holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The image never quite resolves, remaining intentionally incomplete. These figures are engaged in a collective performance—an illusion about illusions—suspended in a moment of shared, silent concentration.
The painting quietly considers what it means to hold something that cannot be held. The tower itself is absent, gestured toward but never touched. What remains is the posture of holding: bodies arranged around an idea, hands reaching for something that isn't there. The surface catches light like a memory fading, the raw edges suggesting something unfinished, still in process.
This is holding as social ritual, as unspoken agreement. Strangers briefly align their bodies in service of a photograph, participating in a tradition no one quite believes in but everyone performs. They hold poses, hold space for one another, hold onto a moment that will circulate beyond them.
The work asks what we are really holding when we reach toward monuments, toward images, toward each other. It suggests that holding can be an act of imagination: we hold what isn't there, we hold space for what we cannot quite grasp, we hold together in gestures that mean something even when we don't fully believe in them.
Lee Welch was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1975 and currently lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. Welch creates gestural, atmospheric paintings that attest to the psychical and emotional depths of his chosen subjects and map out delicate negotiations between beauty, desire, and the painted image. Depicting figures from his own milieu, as well as from history, literature, music, and tennis, Welch finds feeling in that which he depicts, always rendered with the intensity of his particular humanism; a close looking akin to love. In each subject’s specificity, the artist reveals the universal feelings that connect us to each other, and that stretch from our present moment back through time.
Welch received his BFA from the National College of Art and Design in 2009 and his MFA from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam in 2011. Currently based at the dlr Baths Artist Studios, he has previously held residencies at NCAD, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Banff Centre for Arts, the latter supported by the Arts Council.
Welch received his BFA from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in 2009 and his MFA from Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam in 2011. He has since been widely exhibited internationally and received numerous awards. Recent exhibitions have taken place at 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), León, Spain; Glucksman Gallery, Cork; Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. His paintings are in private and public collections such as the MB Art Foundation, the Arts Council, Hugh Lane Gallery, and the OPW - State Art Collection.
with support from the Arts Council of Ireland and dlr County Council