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Lee Wells
There is still no one to untie us 2026

2026

About the Item

What Wells constructs here is a painting about the condition of being bound in an era that believes itself free. Lee Wells There is still no one to untie us 2026 Oil, acrylic and charcoal on canvas 250 x 250 (triptych) This painting asks whether anything has changed. It places Goya’s question from plate 75 of Los Caprichos (1799) into a present tense that cannot answer it, and in doing so it indicts two centuries of progress as a sustained failure to act. The “still” in the title is not melancholy. It is an accusation.
 What Wells constructs here is a painting about the condition of being bound in an era that believes itself free. We scroll through atrocity in real time. We aestheticize catastrophe into content. We watch the bridge collapse and call it engagement. The painting knows this. It holds Baroque violence, Enlightenment satire, and algorithmic production in a single frame and finds the same paralysis operating in all three. The tools change. The binding does not. 
As a statement about contemporary art, the work is equally unsparing. Painting in 2026 exists inside a market that rewards surface and penalizes conviction. The conceptual turn promised liberation from the object and delivered a different captivity: frictionless production, institutional legibility, the artist as brand manager. Wells responds by making a painting that is too large to be decorative, too materially committed to be post-internet, and too historically literate to be naïve. It borrows from the canon without genuflecting. It uses AI without evangelizing or apologizing. It paints over both and keeps painting.
 The triptych format itself refuses the single-image logic that dominates contemporary circulation. This work will not reduce to a thumbnail. It demands a body in a room at a specific address in Athens, standing close enough to see the charcoal grain and far enough back to hold all three panels at once. In a cultural moment that has flattened looking into scrolling, that demand is itself a political act.
 The question Goya asked was rhetorical. Wells makes it literal. The binding is real. The room is open. No one is coming to untie us. The painting says: look at that fact and do not look away.

 A new recombine included as part of Plus Ultra at IFAC Athina First view Saturday June 20, 1600-22:00 Galaxia 11, Neos Kosmos, Athens, 11745 LEE WELLS presents PLUS ULTRA at IFAC Athina, a self-organized installation bringing recent paintings into dialogue with works from the artist’s personal collection. Reflecting on PLUS ULTRA, Wells writes: 
 My practice never sat still inside one clean theory. The work gathered in PLUS ULTRA is material argument, political gut-punch, spiritual ache, time-trap, and psychological autopsy all at once. These forces arrived together long before they found language. Their unresolved friction became the medium. PLUS ULTRA. Further beyond. Post Verba, Verbera. After all the words, the blow.

The exhibition gives a name to a method and conviction that the hand knows things the mind cannot see coming. You make. You discover. The work reveals possibilities that planning could never reach. The only honest response is to keep beyond whatever you thought you understood.
 PLUS ULTRA is a proving ground of accumulated differences. Smooth in places and striated in others, the works remain persistently material and perpetually poised for collision. The installation holds those tensions, opens the door and lets you feel the pressure.
 The featured paintings came out of a systematic destruction of their own beginnings. A pure bliss runs across the surface raw and without narrative restraint while memory slams forward rather than retreating into illusionistic depth. The automatic mark retrieves. Faces I thought I had left behind, crowds I never asked for, the sickening moment when you can't tell your own skin from the crowd's. All of it erupts through the gesture like involuntary memory punching through the body. The past arrives as present shock. Theory and practice chewed on each other in the studio for years without audience or safety net. Later, the writings of Bataille, Bergson and the Situationists provided names for processes the hand had already developed. PLUS ULTRA marks the first occasion that private discovery enters public space.
  • Creator:
    Lee Wells (August 25, 1971, American)
  • Creation Year:
    2026
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 98.43 in (250 cm)Width: 98.43 in (250 cm)
  • Medium:
    Charcoal,Oil,Acrylic
  • Movement & Style:
    Contemporary
  • Period:
    2010-
  • Framing:
    Framing Options Available
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    New York, NY
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU32618199052