Artist Rooms
Antony Cairns | Manuela Falcão |Tomoya Matsuzaki
21st March — 17th May 2025
Encounter is pleased to present Artist Rooms 2025 with Antony Cairns, Manuela Falcão and Tomoya Matsuzaki. This biannual project was first initiated by the gallery in London seven 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 17th May 2025.
Planning your Visit
Encounter, Rua de São Bernardo 15, R/C, 1200-823, Estrela, Lisboa
Wednesday - Saturday 12 - 7pm and by appointment
Antony Cairns
Antony Cairns (1980, London) works across photography, installation and sculpture. Preoccupied with the material process of photography and its intrinsic interplay with technology, at the root of Cairns’ practice is the fusing of advanced means of image reproduction with traditional processes.
Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Mavica, CTY’, Akio Nagasawa, Tokyo (2024), ‘PXL CTY’ Sous Les Etoiles Gallery, New York (2024), ‘PXL CTY,’ The Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris (2023), ‘PXL CTY’, Akio Nagasawa, Tokyo (2023), ‘CTY 5081’, Encounter, Lisbon (2022, ‘CTY_TYO3 TYO4’, Webber, London (2021), ‘TY03TY04’, Akio Nagasawa, Tokyo (2021), ‘CTY-TY03’, Stieglitz 19, Antwerp (2020), ‘Touchstone’, The Photographers Gallery, London (2019), ‘CTY’, Akio Nagasawa, Tokyo (2019), ‘The Tale of Gordon Earl Adams’, Theatre de Verdure, Switzerland (2018), ‘TYO2-LDN4’, Roman Road, London (2017). Selected group exhibitions include; ‘Pushing the envelope’, The National Museum of Computing, United Kingdom (2024), ‘After the end of History’, Hayward Gallery Touring, United Kingdom (2024), ‘New Acquisitions’, Photography Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2023), ‘Civilisation - The way we live now’, Saatchi Gallery, London (2023), ‘What Remains’ Encounter, London (2021), ‘Expired’ Sara Kay Gallery, New York (2019), ‘Artificial Impressions’, Stedelijk Museum Breda (2018), ‘Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art’, Tate Modern, London (2018), ‘London Nights’, Museum of London, London (2018), ‘A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age’, George Eastman Museum, New York (2016), ‘Abstracts’, Copperfield, London (2015), ‘Memory Lab – Photography Challenges History’, Mudam, Luxembourg (2015), ‘Collected Shadows’ Polygon Gallery, Vancouver (2013), ‘ICP Triennial’ International Centre for Photography, New York (2013). In 2015 Cairns won the prestigious Hariban Award.
His work can be found in important public and private collections internationally including The Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Victoria and Albert Museum, George Eastman Museum, Archive of Modern Conflict and Tate Library.