DOUG WELSH
LIFELIKE
JANUARY 26 – MARCH 23, 2025
F is pleased to announce Lifelike, an exhibition by Houston-based artist Doug Welsh. Comprised of a selection of paintings made over the last year, the exhibition presents Welsh’s recent ventures into overt figuration alongside and within his complex non-objective visual language. The exhibition is on view by appointment, from January 26 – March 23, 2025, at 4225 Gibson Street, Houston TX, 77007, with a public reception on January 26, from 2–5 pm. Lifelike is Welsh’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
For the past several years, Welsh’s paintings have sought to define and create their own worlds. Through material and imagistic explorations, the artist creates colorful, dreamlike compositions, interpretable as land or seascapes, or even cosmic and extraterrestrial horizons. In these abstract works, for which Welsh is best known, he plays with opacity and translucency, rendering spaces that seem simultaneously vast and immediate. More recently, his exploration has led him to shorten the depth of that pictorial space, resulting in more graphic solutions, blocking out opaque single-color shapes from the gestural and patterned underpainting in works that focus on the flatness of the surface and on paint itself.
The paintings in Lifelike move across this terrain while also charting new territory. Three of the paintings, Thief in the night, Clearest Blue, and Whispers in my ear (all 2024), manifest various throughlines from Welsh’s non-objective bodies of work. In two other paintings in the exhibition, Welsh turns towards figuration, centering the human body within his canvases. Elaine (2025) is a wistful and lyrical portrait of painter Elaine de Kooning drawn in a linear white cartoon, a ghostlike muse that seems to both emerge from and recede behind a scrubbed screen of blue, red, and green-hued forms. In contrast, the busy double-portrait Nancy and Hutch (2025) portrays Welsh’s seated sister with her cat on her lap in playfully chaotic, twisting lines, jagged blocks of color, and the almost architecturally specific space around them, offering up the human and feline figures through a more substantial and physical presence.
If the primary body in Welsh’s early paintings is his own, transmitted through his laying down of paint and the time spent crafting their surfaces, his new works invite inspirational icons and loved ones to inhabit these worlds with him. Abstraction allowed the artist to develop a direct relationship with painting, to “learn what paint could do and what [he] could do with paint,” and to “develop a meditative, ritualistic, and lifelong practice.” In Lifelike, we see Welsh open up the pictorial space to allow life and love inside the frame in new and unexpected ways, and in so doing, transforming how we might read his non-objective works and his practice as a whole.
Doug Welsh (b. 1991, Miami, FL) lives in Houston. He received his BFA from Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, and an MFA from the University of Houston. Recent exhibitions include the two-person show Conversations at Home, landSPACE: a kunsthalle, Austin (with Terry Suprean), re-rite, Art League Houston, Form + Void, LSC North Harris Fine Arts Gallery, Angel Dust, Pablo Cardoza Gallery, Ignition, The Jung Center, and HARRY SMITH’S SHIRT, F (all Houston). Welsh has organized numerous exhibitions, including leftovers, landSPACE: a kunsthalle, Austin, It’s OK to Feel This, LRT Gallery Houston, orbit, ESS Gallery 1, Houston, and Bearing Witness: A Fundraiser for Ukraine, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston. His art criticism appears regularly in Glasstire, the Texas online arts journal. Welsh teaches at Lone Star College North Harris and is co-founder of the Elgin Street Summer Intensive, a program for MFA candidates at the University of Houston.
Clockwise from door:
Clearest Blue, 2024
House paint and spray paint on canvas, artist's frame
8 x 10 inches
Elaine, 2025
House paint and spray paint on canvas, artist's frame
30 x 24 inches
Whispers in my ear, 2024
House paint and spray paint on canvas, artist's frame
20 x 16 inches
Thief in the night, 2024
House paint and spray paint on canvas, artist's frame
8 x 10 inches
Nancy and Hutch, 2025
House paint, spray paint, and charcoal on canvas, artist's frame
30 x 24 inches
F
4225 Gibson Street
Houston TX 77007
For more information, please contact Adam Marnie at office@fmagazine.info