OEDIPUS
24 MAY - 14 JUNE 2025
THE COMPLEX
LEE WELCH
“Welch’s painting unfolds like a memory misfiled—imprecise, faint at the edges, yet insistent in its atmosphere.”
LEE WELCH - OEDIPUS
€20,00
This post exhibition publication – the first widely-available monograph on Lee Welch – documents and expands on the artist’s exhibition at The Complex, Dublin. Featuring a significant newly commissioned essay by Martin Herbert, which meditates on the aesthetics and politics of Welch’s portraiture, alongside a conversation between the artist and Mark O’Gorman, the book serves as a lasting record of Welch’s current work while offering deeper insight into his practice.
Beautifully reproducing Welch’s recent paintings with an emphasis on their poignant details, this publication also includes a wide selection of earlier works alongside the texts, as well as in-the-studio photographs that provide an intimate glimpse into his process and practice.
PUBLISHER
spider & ink
LANGUAGE
English
COMPOSITION
Hardcover
CONTRIBUTORS
Text by Martin Herbert, Mark O'Gorman and Lee Welch.
ISBN
9781068307058
PUBLICATION DATE
July 2025
PAGES
40
SIZE
210 x 140 mm
EXPLORE THE EXHIBITION
Lee Welch’s latest exhibition, Oedipus, spans painting, printmaking, and installation, offering a quietly arresting meditation on perception, memory, and connection. His visual language is spare but loaded with figures, gestures, and fragments reduced to their essentials—each carrying unexpected emotional weight. Drawing from art history, culture, and the mundane rituals of daily life, Welch distills images into something tender yet uneasy, their resonance lingering long after viewing.
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all is vanity
2025
acrylic on polyester
137 x 102 cm -
all silently concentrating
2025
acrylic on polyester
180 x 140 cm
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.
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epochal defining while one creates beautiful problems
2025
acrylic on polyester
180 x 140 cm -
for a long time I had wanted
2025
acrylic on polyester
100 x 80 cm
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.
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a whole string of failures
2025
acrylic on polyester
140 x 110 cm -
the smallest daily chore can be humanised
2025
acrylic on polyester
140 x 110 cm
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.
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I'm just going to leave it
2025
acrylic on polyester
100 x 80 cm -
mindless superstition and pointless ritual
2025
acrylic on polyester
50 x 40 cm
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.
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aqua seafoam shame
2025
acrylic on polyester
100 x 80 cm
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.
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all at once
2025
acrylic on polyester
140 x 110 cm
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.
all apologies 2025
lithographic Print on Somerset Satin 300gsm, edition of 25 + 2 A/P
30.5 x 24.5 cm / 12 x 9.6 in
love and its shadows 2025
lithographic Print on Somerset Satin 300gsm, edition of 25 + 2 A/P
30.5 x 24.5 cm / 12 x 9.6 in
Poster
€40
This signed poster featuring a detail from the painting for a long time I had wanted (2025) was produced in 2025, in conjunction with the exhibition Oedipus at The Complex, Dublin. In for a long time I had wanted, 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 poster is also available unsigned.
Publisher: The Complex
Year: 2025
Dimensions: 70 x 50 cm
Framed: Sold unframed
ON VIEW IN THE COMPLEX
The gallery is open Monday - Friday 10am - 5pm, Saturday 12pm - 5pm.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
LEE WELCH
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 Artforum, Art Monthly, Frieze, Irish Arts Review, and The Irish Times.
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