Dominic McElwee

Palermo, Italy

Dominic McElwee is a contemporary New Zealand artist based in Palermo, Italy. With a practice centred on delicate small-scale realist paintings on metal, his work draws inspiration from Renaissance and Baroque-era European art. Having focused his work of recent years on intimate figure compositions, his latest work also extends to a subtle subversion of still life, portrait and landscape tropes. This critical engagement with art-historical conventions is a constant throughout his work, which addresses the present through paraphrases of its artistic past.

In an often-minimalistic reimagining of the seventeenth-century Dutch Fijnschilder genre, McElwee makes his paintings’ small scale fundamental to their effect: scrupulous renderings of fabrics, textures and reflective surfaces invite close attention while frequent perspective cues draw viewers into the works’ spaces and narratives. Ranging from Hopper-esque scenes of solitary despair to sardonic visual puns, McElwee’s sharp visual instincts and technical acuity draw an unlikely continuity from a spectrum of moods and meanings.

Over an art practice spanning more than two decades, McElwee has won art prizes in New Zealand (Parkin Prize, People’s Choice and Merit Awards, 2014) and Italy (Premio Nazionale delle Arti, Special Prize ‘Arte e Legalità’, 2022) and has exhibited in Spain, Italy, Scotland, and New Zealand. He has studied history and anthropology at Victoria University, Wellington, and holds a postgraduate diploma in painting from the Accademia di Belle Arti of Palermo, Italy. Alongside his art practice he is a writer of fiction and a translator specialising in art history, contemporary art and art criticism, in which capacity he has worked with notable international artists and scholars. Among his many translations are art historian Giulia Ingarao’s Leonora Carrington: The Image of Dreams, a biography of the Surrealist artist (Milan, 2022); and critic Roberto Lambarelli’s Annina Nosei, a survey of the career of the New York art dealer (Rome, 2023).