Artist Rooms 2023
Anna Schachinger - Health, Prosperity, Joy
Neha Vedpathak - Upon a Hill
Kemar Keanu Wynter - Digest
24th March- 14th May 2023
Encounter is pleased to present Artist Rooms 2023 with Anna Schachinger, Neha Vedpathak and Kemar Keanu Wynter. This biannual project was first initiated by the gallery in London five years ago and gives each artist the opportunity to present a focused solo installation of a specific series of recent work.
Kemar Keanu Wynter’s ‘Digest’ is the artist’s first exhibition in Portugal. The presentation focusses on an interconnected body of watercolours created during Wynter’s studio residencies at the ARos Kunstmuseum in Aarhus, Denmark and the Art Quarter Budapest in Budafok. The works, which are each accompanied by a piece of poetic prose, are haptic recollections of specific sensory moments and map the artist’s experiences of travelling around Europe over a period of three months. In each work, Wynter pushes the boundaries of abstract composition, accentuating and blurring, constructing and erasing, contrasting and blending. In this manner, layered processes of remembering become material form. Reminiscences are enabled through subtle slippages of line, overlapping spills of paint and an energetic language of coded marks. The exhibitions title itself speaks to multiple possibilities for reading the works, at once suggesting a condensation of information and intrinsic bodily process. Fascinated by the creative intersections between painting and cooking, Wynter draws upon his years of making food in familial kitchens and a nourished upbringing along the bakery and jerk shop-lined cross-streets of Crown Heights (NYC). As such, Kemar Keanu Wynter’s painterly works on paper are a generous stew of language and pigment. Wynter’s evocative fields of color frequently operate with suggestive references to his histories; one, storied and generations-long in the Antilles and another budding and burgeoning in the Five Boroughs.
Anna Schachinger will present a combination of two bodies of work in her installation for ‘Health Prosperity Joy’. A combination of ‘Stehende’ ceramic sculptures (created during the Maumaus residency in Lisbon) and paintings from the ‘Hanne’ series. In both series, fragmentary suggestions of different figures, forms and characters intertwine and merge, appear and recede, fold and curve. The artist is interested in exploring formal structures of making. She complicates processes by which works take shape as a means to reflect on queer feminist discourse and its position within contemporary painting. In both series, Schachinger offers the possibility of multiple perspectives and ways of seeing. Compositions rotate, forms repeat and bodies bend. Through a non-linear spontaneity of gesture, different marks and figures interact, co-exist and become dependent on each other. At the core of the work is a vital sensitivity to the malleability of materials, an ongoing process of creation which engenders an inherent openness and dynamism.
In ‘Upon a hill’, Neha Vedpathak presents a series of five new paintings (2022-23) by this title. Occupying an intriguing space between painting, collage and sculpture in Vedpathak’s meditative ‘plucked’ Japanese paper works, suggestions of remembered places and moments appear within the material’s intricate webs. The artist employs a unique process, developed over the last decade, meticulously separating the paper’s fibers with a pushpin and then staining, soaking and layering the material with evocative combinations of paint and pigment. In this sense, the artist makes gestural marks through material slippages. As paint binds the paper, the works transition between their ephemeral suggestions of shifting landscape and the sculptural fixity that this unique process creates. Imbued with an inherent tension between precarity and certainty, there is a playful spontaneity to these layered tactile constructions, their intimate scale drawing focus and inviting close looking.
Artist Rooms runs until 13th May 2023.
Planning your Visit
Encounter, Rua de Sao Bernardo 15, RC, 1200 823, Estrela, Lisboa
Wednesday - Saturday 2-7pm and by appointment
Anna Schachinger
Anna Schachinger (*1990, lives and works in Vienna, Austria) explores the parameters of painting and expands them through queer-feminist discourse on both material and visual levels. She received her diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2018, participated in the maumaus study program in Lisbon in 2017 and studied at School of the Art Institute in Chicago from 2010 to 2012.
Recent solo and duo exhibitions include: 2022 ‘Allover‘, Lumiar Cité, Lisbon (PT), ‘Aneinander‘, SOPHIE TAPPEINER, Vienna; 2020 ‘Disaster!‘, with Julia Goodman, SOPHIE TAPPEINER hosted by Zahorian & Van Espen Gallery, Prague as part of SUMO (CZ), ‘Hitze’, SOPHIE TAPPEINER, Vienna (AT); 2019 ‘Desta Maneira Não‘, Madragoa ENCIMA, Lisbon (PT), ‘Pensive State‘ with Irina Lotarevich, SOPHIE TAPPEINER, Vienna (AT); 2018 ‘Holderinnen’, Brennan and Griffin, New York (USA), ‘Lost in Thoughts’, fourteen30, Portland (US); 2017 ‘alles‘, lulu, Mexico City (MX); 2016 ‘White Crocodile’, fAN Kunstverein, Vienna (AT). Selected group exhibitions include: 2022 ‘Avantgarde und Gegenwart‘, curated by Luisa Ziaja, Belvedere 21, Vienna (AT), ‘A Minor Constellation‘, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles (US); 2021 ‘Ernesto de Sousa, Exercises of Poetic Communication with Other Aesthetic Operators‘, curated by Lilou Vidal, Galeria Quadrum and Avenida da India Gallery, Lisbon (PT), ‘Avant-Garde and the Contemporary‘, Belvedere 21, Vienna (AT), ‘Particularities‘, X Museum, Beijing (CN), ‘Therein / Thereof / Thereto’ Standard, Oslo (NO); 2019 ‘Prince.sse.s des villes’, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (FR), ‘La peinture abstraite‘, La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels (BE), ‘Gertrude‘, Loggia, Munich (D); 2018 ‘Use your Illusion’, Herald Street, London (UK), ‘At Large’, Reyes Projects, Detroit (US).
Anna Schachinger published her first artist’s book ‘Treffen’ in 2022.
Neha Vedpathak
Neha Vedpathak (1982) lives and maintains a studio in Detroit, Michigan. In her widely acclaimed works on Japanese paper Vedpathak employs a ‘plucking’ technique, a rigorous self-invented process to create works that aim to broaden the dialog and understanding of issues related to identity, spirituality, social and gender politics. Vedpathak has been an artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch Art Center, Fountainhead Residency, Skopelos Foundation for the Arts, Greece, Bharat Bhavan Graphic Studio, India & CAMAC, France.
Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include; ‘Neha Vedpathak - Time (Constant, Suspended, Collapsed’) , Flint Art Museum, Michigan (2021), ‘Surface Rhythms’, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York (2020), ‘Into the Woods’, Simone De Sousa Gallery, Detroit (2020), ‘Many Moons, Same Sky’, Simone De Sousa Gallery, Detroit (2019), ‘Of the Land’, N'Namdi Center for Contemporary, Detroit (2018), ‘Bhabha’, The Poetry Foundation, Chicago (2016), ‘The Space Between’, N’Namdi Contemporary, Miami (2013), ‘Neha Vedpathak’, One Prudential Plaza, Chicago (2012). Recent group exhibitions include; ‘Invisible Threads’ Baker Art Museum, Florida (2022), ‘Fermata’ Encounter, London (2022), ‘Emerge’ National Indo American Museum, Lombard (2021), ‘Alterations, Activation, Abstraction’, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York (2019), ‘Edition 18’, Simone De Sousa Gallery, Detroit (2018), ‘Art on Paper’, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro (2017), ‘Transformation’ (performance), Arizona State University Museum, Arizona (2016).
Vedpathak’s work can be found in important public and private collections internationally including Detroit Institute of Art, Progressive Art Collection, Camac Art Centre, Czech Academy of Sciences, Bharat Bhavan Arts Center, Madhya Pradesh State Art Museum, Anderson Ranch Arts Centre.
Kemar Keanu Wynter
Kemar Keanu Wynter (b. Brooklyn, NY) holds a BFA from the SUNY Purchase School of Art and Design. Drawing upon his years of Friday nights cooking in familial kitchens and a nourished upbringing along the bakery and jerk shop-lined cross-streets of Crown Heights, Kemar Keanu Wynter’s abstract works are a generous stew of language and pigment. Layers of luscious, gestural strokes draw the viewer into fields of color which frequently operate with coded references to his histories; one, storied and generations-long in the Antilles and another budding and burgeoning in the Five Boroughs.
His work was the focus of recent solo exhibitions at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York (2021) and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Queens (2021). He has exhibited in several recent group shows including Death of Beauty, Sargents Daughters, Los Angeles, USA, Notes on Ecstatic Unity, OTP Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; Faraway Nearby, North Loop Gallery, Williamstown, MA; Friends and Family, Magenta Plains, NY; Shining in the Low Tide, Unclebrother, Hancock, NY; and I Saw it Hang Down There, Bode Projects, Berlin. Wynter has been an artist-in-residence at the Macedonia Institute, Anderson Ranch, Ox-Bow School of Art, the ARoS Kunstmuseum in Aarhus, Denmark and AQB in Budapest, Hungary (both facilitated by Flux Factory, New York). His work is held in the collection of the Art Galleries at Black Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. Wynter has forthcoming solo shows with Encounter Lisbon and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in the spring of 2023.