Divine Hosts, 2025
acrylic on polyester
254 x 204 cm / 100 x 80.3 in
Divine Hosts (2025) is Lee Welch’s most ambitious work to date, produced during a residency at Kunstwerk Kolderveen, NL. Standing at over 2.5 meters tall, it offers a hauntingly modern perspective on ancient history.
While the original statues of the deities Amun and Mut were recently reassembled from 79 fragments for the Grand Egyptian Museum (designed by Dublin’s own Heneghan Peng Architects), Welch presents a different story.
Instead of solid stone and ancient power, this work is a spectral, translucent rendering—a ghostly diagram suspended against a faint grid. The act of holding these forms in place performs a kind of alchemy, reconstructing not only what once was, but the resonant beauty of what remains.
It captures these figures not at the height of their triumph, but at the very edge of vanishing, questioning what it means for an image to survive as a mere trace. It’s monumental, it’s fragile, bridging the rift between a fractured past and our increasingly disembodied present.
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