Artist Rooms

21st October - 3rd November

Harminder Judge - Whitney McVeigh - Alexis Teplin - Alexi Tsioris

Encounter is pleased to present Artist Rooms opening on Wednesday 21st October at Copeland Gallery in South London. The show, which celebrates the third edition of this critically acclaimed annual project, marks Encounter’s first exhibition of each of the participating artists.

The concept is deceptively simple. Four distinguished international contemporary artists. Four distinct rooms in which to create an engaging exhibit or installation. Juxtaposing nuanced and diverse visual languages, Artist Rooms 2020 provides each participant an opportunity to innovate and assert their individuality as practitioners. From the installation of a precariously balanced folding boat (circa.1900) through to meditative sculptural portals and poetic assemblages of found textiles, the multidisciplinary works on display make for a rich viewing experience.

Judge’s room brings together a previously unseen group of plaster and pigment works sitting on an unstable edge between painting and sculpture, image and illusion. The artist employs this intriguing new medium as a means to explore themes of technology and spirituality whilst also echoing histories of abstract image making in India. 

Alongside her widely acclaimed paintings, sculptures and installations, Teplin brings to her room a new body of watercolors made during the recent lockdown. Interrogating the field of expanded painting the artist’s layered works explore the medium’s complex relation to historical quotation, labour and cultural politics.

Marking Tsioris’s first UK exhibition, his presentation spans painting, printmaking and sculpture. Concerned with accumulation and erasure, Tsioris’s ‘line languages’ cut into the personal and dance across the allegorical to carve out an intriguing visual vocabulary bound up in the corporeal and the symbolic.

McVeigh brings together significant objects from her personal collection and ink on paper paintings created during a residency in China. Concerned with ‘the archaeology of memory’, McVeigh sensitively intervenes into found objects and conjures ancient landscapes continuously exploring the notion of history as a channel for our personal and collective memory.

Artist Rooms will run until 3rd November 2020. At a moment in which physical ‘encounters’ with contemporary art practice have become ever more scarce and necessary, this ambitious project is certainly not one to miss.   

Planning your visit

21st October - 3rd November | Exhibition Open by Appointment

Please book a private viewing appointment prior to your visit. We are happy to arrange viewings Monday - Sunday from 10am - 7.30pm. The gallery is a Covid safe environment and we are complying with all government regulations. We very much look forward to showing you the exhibition.

Harminder Judge

Harminder Judge lives and works in London and trained at The Royal Academy Schools (2017-21). Exploring ideas centred around the universality of condition, tantra, spiritual and cultural cross pollination, the portal and the internal and external body, Judge’s work takes the form of performance, video, installation and object-making. Upcoming exhibitions include; ‘Artist Rooms,’ Encounter, London (2020) and ‘Am I Human To You?,’ Jugendstilsenteret and Kube Museum, Norway (2021). Recent Exhibitions include; ‘The Soft Display,’ Paradise Works, Manchester (2020),  ‘Tomorrow: London,’ White Cube, London, UK (2020), ‘Our Ashes Make Great Fertilizer’ Public Gallery, London, UK (2020), ‘Where We Are,’ Mercer’s Hall, London, UK (2020), ‘At Home In The Universe,’ Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, India (2020), ‘A Plot For The Multiverse,’ Indigo + Madder, London, UK (2019), ‘Premiums,’ Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2019), ‘Honeymoon’ Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2018).  In 2011 he won the Art Foundation Fellowship Award in Performance Art and was recently awarded a 5 year residency at ACME’s Fire Station, London.

Whitney McVeigh

Whitney McVeigh studied a BA in painting at Edinburgh College of Art (1993-6). She has travelled extensively to carry out her practice and held residencies in Mexico, India, China and South Africa. Her work investigates personal and collective memory and alludes to the layering of time. Upcoming exhibitions include; Photo London, Somerset House, London (2020) and Artist Rooms, Encounter, London (2020). Recent solo exhibitions include; ‘Temporality, Cardi Projects, Cardi Gallery (2020), What is Worthwhile Doing in this World, Mount Stuart Visual Arts, Scotland (2019), Elegy to Nature, Eykyn Maclean, New York (2018), Language of Memory, Summerhall Arts, Edinburgh (2016), Inventory: Invisible Companion, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2015) and presentation of the film ‘Birth’: Origins at the end of life at the Royal Academy, London (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Plato in LA: Contemporary Artists’ Visions, Getty Villa, Los Angeles (2018), Not a Sngle Story, The Wanas Foundation, Sweden and Nirox Foundation, South Africa (2018), Culture Lines: Sans Frontieres, Metamatic-Taf Foundation, Athens (2016), Unlocking the Diary, The Archiving of Nameless Memories, Folkestone Triennial, Kent (2014) and Glass Stress, White Light/White Heat, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013).

Whitney McVeigh was featured in the BBC4 television documentary, Where is Modern Art Now (2009) alongside Sir Anthony Caro, Michael Landy, Grayson Perry and Cornelia Parker. Simon Schama’s recent essay on McVeigh’s practice ‘The Happenstance of Illumination’(2018) was included in his book Wordy (Simon & Schuster), published in June 2019. Her work will be included in ‘Imagined Spaces’ edited by Kirsty Gunn & Gail Low (Autumn 2020) with Voyage Out Press & Saraband Books, an anthology that creates a “space” between understanding and the imagination.

Alexis Teplin

Alexis Teplin lives and works in London.  Teplin’s work begins within the history of two-dimensional painting and expands to include performance, video and sculpture. Her work explores the nature of painting through its relationship to historical quotation, labour, cultural politics and positions of decadence. She received her M.F.A. from Art Centre College of Design, Los Angeles in 2001 and was the Starr Fellow at the Royal Academy Schools in 2002.

Recent solo exhibitions include; ‘It’s My Pleasure to Participate,’ Bluecoat, Liverpool (2019), Painted Costumes, New Art Centre, Roche Court, East Winterslow (2019), ‘Keats Favorite,’ Aqubar, London (2018), ‘Drag, Push HOOT,’ Mary Mary, Glasgow (2016), HE and HO for O,’ Rise Projects, Silvie Fleming Collection, London (2016), ‘La Grotto Rosa,’ Cardrde, Bologna (2014), ‘San Marino Calling,’ Museo D’Arte Modena e Contemporanea, San Marino (2014), ‘He, Ho, HA, hmmm.,’ Mary Mary, Glasgow (2013) and ‘sss T !!,’ Hayward Project Space, London (2013). Recent Group Exhibitions include; ‘Bauhaus 100,’ Camberwell School of the Arts (2019), ‘The Most Real Thing, contemporary textiles and sculpture,’ New Art Centre, Roche Court, East Winterslow (2018), ‘Arch (The Politics of Fragmentation),’ Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018), ‘Bedswerver,’ Flat Two, London (2018), ‘Stretch Release,’ Durst Brit and Mayhew, The Hague (2017), ‘Arch (The Politics of Fragmentation),’ Sydney Biennale, Sydney (2016), ‘20th Anniversary Exhibition,’ Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2016). Teplin’s work has been featured in notable publications such as Frieze Magazine, Artforum and The New York Times. Teplin currently teaches painting at RCA London and Fine Art at Kingston University.

Alexi Tsioris

Alexi Tsioris, born 1982 in Athens, lives and works in Munich. In his artistic work, Alexi Tsioris concentrates on the mediums of drawing, painting, monotype, and sculpture. Through these, the artist pursues one idea in particular: he layers bodies and figures, thus reproducing what is individual in the corporeal and symbolically turning the human being inside out. In his painting, engravings in layers of oil paint expose colors and forms, supplemented with an abundance of ornamentation. After the artist had already been awarded the Art Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 2011, he also received the Bavarian Art Promotion Prize for Fine Arts last year. Recent solo exhibitions include; ‘Alexi Tsioris,’ Livie Fine Art, Zurich (2020), ‘Cosmic Fruits,’ Jahn und Jahn, Munich (2020), ‘Fluss ohne Ufer,’Kunstpavillon Alter Botanischer Garten, Munich (2018), ‘Belladonna,’ Artothek & Bildersaal, Munich (2017), ‘Flaum & Splitter,’ Galerie Jahn Baaderstrasse, Munich (2015) and ‘Attic Studio,’ Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich (2015).