LEE WELCH

This hardcover monograph on Lee Welch, serves as the first comprehensive publication on the artist, documenting and expanding on his Oedipus exhibition at The Complex, Dublin. The 64-page volume will beautifully reproduce Welch’s recent paintings, emphasising their poignant details, and include earlier works. The book features critical essays by Martin Herbert, a text by Jennifer Higgie, and Mark O'Gorman.

Herbert’s essay explores the politics of Welch's portraiture, arguing that the exhibition's fragmented layout and the paintings' tendency to obscure faces demand a "hybrid modality of perception" (using memory and imagination), positioning the work as a reflection of current social anxieties—the "texture of reality"—while offering a "floating rehab for eyes and mind." Higgie's focuses on the painting epochal defining while one creates beautiful problems, which was inspired by the despair of a Ukrainian chess grandmaster, interpreting it as a symbol of the human condition—of exhaustion and defeat—and hinting at the horror and disorientation experienced by those under siege in Ukraine. Finally, the text by O'Gorman delves into the walls of the exhibition as choreographed partitions, creating a "rhythm of seeing and not seeing" that allows each painting to be encountered as a separate act.

Text by Jennifer Higgie, Martin Herbert and Mark O'Gorman.

Published by spider & ink
English
Hardcover
64 pages
215 x 145 mm
ISBN 9781068307058