Artist Rooms 2025

Tomoya Matsuzaki | Manuela Falcão | Antony Cairns

21st March — 17th May 2025

Encounter is pleased to present Artist Rooms 2025, with Antony Cairns (London, United Kingdom, 1980), Manuela Falcão (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1991) and Tomoya Matsuzaki (Fukuoka, Japan, 1977) opening on Thursday 20th March. This biannual project was first initiated by the gallery seven years ago to provide artists with an opportunity to present an installation of a specific series of work within a single room.

Antony Cairns has selected a series of images (stills from 2014-24) of the metropolis at night printed on aluminium silver gelatin coated plates. Originating as black and white negatives on film, he began developing his pictures of cities on metallic sheets, employing the spills and imperfections of the complex process to produce intricate, abstract photographs. Drawn from an archive of images - from London to Tokyo, Shanghai to Seoul - at the core of the artist’s practice is a fascination with the process by which the metaphorical potential of the photographic image can be extended through innovative methods of reproduction. Through his experiments with antiquated photographic technologies, the places Cairns captures become hazy in both their form and location, distorted and non-linear, creating a unique atmosphere.  Through his engagement with complex methods of image making -- such as the effect of light on 35mm black and white film transparencies—the focus moves from the specificity of the architectural forms captured, to the peripheral spaces which exist between them. The sites' Cairns records thus become amorphous, a sprawling maze of structures, lights and shapes. Imbued with a general sense of urbanized space and the ambience of a metropolis at night, the nebulous imagery disrupts the sharp, recognisable architectural structures of the city and begins to bleed into abstract ‘shapes of light’. What was once familiar is thus re-visioned and made strange, transformed by having been subject to a reverse technological torque.

Manuela Falcão utilises intuitive and experimental processes of moulding, glazing and firing to imbue each of her ceramic sculptures with a distinctive identity and dynamism. Whilst gesturing towards formal histories of abstraction, this series is also strongly rooted in environment, both built and organic. Some of the striking forms read as newly discovered organisms stretching out into space, whilst others seem to have more delineated structures, interwoven like pieces of a visual puzzle with no fixed beginning or end. The works possess a paradoxical sensibility. Falcão's pieces negotiate a radical rawness combined with a notion that they have been formed slowly through a long period of erosion. They are shapeshifters - at once familiar and strange, weighty and light. They balance carefully, like branches of coral rooting themselves amidst a tidal swell or intimate artefacts tentatively brought to light. Concerned with psychic image, Falcão’s works possess a palpable sense of layering and editing derived from the artist’s background in film production. Her work demonstrates a unique ability to create visual hooks from which the sculpture's evocative forms perform their subtle poetry.

Concerned with painterly architectures, Tomoya Matsuzaki’s sensitive works are profoundly rooted in landscape both personal and collective, remembered and embodied. Primarily engaged with atmospheres of place, soft edged marks hover and converge to form fleeting suggestions of environment. In these enigmatic objects, half-familiar moons and suns emerge from a reduced palette of colour casting dappled shadows across the ground. The artist's repeating compositional motifs recall not only the changing temperament of the sky on a cloudy day but histories of modern British painting and sculpture from Nash to Hepworth. In his distinctive practice, which extends well beyond the two dimensional picture plane, collecting, curating and intuitive mark making intersect to become a form of ongoing research. These diverse interests productively overlap to open up alternate possibilities for the spaces that a painting can inhabit. Instead of limiting the artwork to the boundaries of a flat surface, Matsuzaki views it as a three-dimensional object spilling across borders and out of the frame. He paints with oil on the surface of irregularly formed jesmonite slabs, mounting pieces on structural wooden beams or integrating found objects within their compositions. As such, the viewer operates both within and outside the installation, both paintings and objects become vessels of memory carrying impressions of the lands through which they have passed.

Artist Rooms 2025 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, UK) 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. Cairns’ powerful dystopian visions of urban centres are devoid of people and have their root in stills captured in London, New York, Las Vegas, Tokyo and Busan. This archive of captivating images acts as a starting point for the artist’s wider creative exploration of the history of photographic reproduction, experimental printing methods and the aesthetics of abstraction.

Recent solo exhibitions include ‘PXL CTY’ Sous Les Etoiles Gallery, New York (2024), ‘PXL CTY,’ The Maison Européenne 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; ‘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.

Manuela Falcão

Manuela Falcão (1991, Porto Alegre, Brazil) is an artist who lives and works in Lisbon. Following a successful career in film production she completed a course in Ceramics and Painting at Ar.Co Lisbon (2020-22) and advanced course in Visual Arts at the same institution (2022-24). Recent and upcoming exhibitions include 'Artist Rooms 2025', Encounter, Lisbon (2025), Ar.Co’s Scholarships and Finalists Exhibition, Museu Bordalo Pinheiro (2024), 'Cacto-Orquídea', curated by Ana Grebler and Pedro Liñares, Lisbon (2024), 'Berlinale Talents', Berlin (2018). Alongside private collections her work is held in the Ar.CO collection.

Tomoya Matsuzaki

Tomoya Matsuzaki (1977, Fukuoka, Japan) lives and works between London and Tokyo. He moved to the U.K in 1997, completing his BA at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in 2002, followed by an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2004. For Matsuzaki, landscapes are a manifestation of our collective emotions and psyche. Paintings evoke, rather than depict, the landscape; soft-edged marks drift and overlap, calling to mind the blurriness of misty hills or a rainy seascape. Works are painted in subdued tones onto both sides of irregularly-shaped jesmonite, with holes allowing us to see from one side to the other. Hung at different heights from wooden struts, the works appear to float amongst one another, demonstrating Matsuzaki’s approach to the painting as more than a pictorial plane, and instead as an object that extends into three dimensions.

Selected upcoming and recent exhibitions include: ‘Layering Time: Depicting the World’, Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2025), 'Artist Rooms', Encounter, Lisbon (2025,), 'Tides', Yutaka Kikutaka Gallery, Tokyo (2021), 'Petrichor Grey', Volt, Eastbourne (2023), 'Unmapped Territory', Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tokyo (2021), 'TORINUKE', Yutaka Kikutake Gallery, Tokyo (2020), 'Crossing', Hagiwara Projects, Tokyo (2019), 'John Moores Painting Prize 2018', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2018), 'A creak in the stair', SIXSECOND, London (2018), 'Odd Metre', White Conduit Projects, London (2017), Drop, 'Only Connect Project', Hiroshima (2016), 'Graphic Interchange Format', Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-sea (2015), 'Endogenous II', Maria Stenfors, London (2013), 'Lonely and Friend', L'est, London (2005), 'Arrivals' (Selected by Emma Dexter), Pump House Gallery, London (2004), 'Space Concepts', Austin/Desmond Fine Arts, London (2003).