Patrick Morales-Lee was taught by the painter John Virtue, his work is held in a number of private collections, including the permanent collection of Soho House.

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"Strong, thoughtful and unsettling work.

An age-old search for artistic truth, in modern dress."

Laura Gascoigne, Arts critic and commentator

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Recent works mark a transition from drawing into painting, extending the immediacy of line into a more expansive engagement with colour, surface, gesture, and erasure. The paintings resist fixed narratives, instead operating through ambiguity, fragmentation, and repetition, where meaning is constructed through the tension between presence and absence.

 

Figures within the work function less as portraits than as structures, occupying spaces that move between observation and recollection. Through recurring female forms, familial relationships, and his own presence within the paintings, the work considers how identity is constructed through lived experience, shaped in part by the tension of having both a birth mother and an adoptive mother. Layering, distortion, and obscuring disrupt singular readings, allowing meaning to emerge through process and material negotiation.