Neha Vedpathak | Ideally Imprecise
5th April - 11th May 2024
Rua De São Bernardo 15, Lisbon
Encounter is pleased to present ‘Neha Vedpathak: Ideally Imprecise’, opening on Thursday 4th April, 9-11pm. This important exhibition marks the artist’s first solo presentation in Europe and brings together a collection of new works made between 2023-2024. This intriguing body of work is representative of the distinct visual language for which Vedpathak has become acclaimed. In this exhibition, the artist carves out new sites for investigation reflecting on and interrogating established histories of minimal abstract painting.
Vedpathak employs a rigorous self-developed technique, she refers to as ‘plucking’, which involves separating the fibres of handmade Japanese mulberry paper using a tiny pushpin. This method, developed since 2009, produces work with an enigmatic textural, immersive and sculptural quality. There is a distinctly spiritual aspect to Vedpathak’s slow and laborious process. The artist spends hours and days working on and into her material, a slow and painstaking method which operates on a tipping point between risk and repetition. The ritualistic quality of this technique sits somewhere between meditation and obsession for Vedpathak. The meditative quality of Vedpathak’s process is evoked in viewing the works too; each recess reads as an intricate loop in a seemingly infinite web of delicate paper. The elusive materiality of the works opens up multiple possibilities, they operate on an unstable edge between painting, drawing and installation. The works’ constructions can be likened to both intricate organic structures or lace-like fabrics. Multiple threads of ideas intersperse, interweaving narratives that touch on bodily trace, memory and temporality.
Often in Vedpathak’s practice, suggestive forms such as residues of landscape and architectural fragments intuitively emerge through a sensitive and considered approach to colour and composition. However, in ‘Ideally Imprecise’, Vedpathak extends this refined visual syntax by incorporating and subverting essential visual tropes of 20th century abstract painting. Woven grids ripple and undulate, centric seams become imprecise and once ‘hard edged’ squares reverberate and float. There is a confident quietness and celebration of reduction in this exhibition of Vedpathak. Later this year, the artist will exhibit with Agnes Martin in ‘Subtleism’ at The Cranbrook Art Museum in Michigan. ‘Ideally Imprecise’ is a testament to the transcendent potential of painting and the psychic power of the understated.
The exhibition will run until 11th May 2024.
Planning your Visit
Encounter, Rua de São Bernardo 15 R/C, 1200-823, Estrela, Lisboa
Wednesday - Saturday 12-7pm and by appointment
Neha Vedpathak
Neha Vedpathak (b. 1982, Pune, India) is a Detroit-based artist who creates sculptural installations and wall reliefs made from paper. Through her studio practice Vedpathak aims to broaden the dialogue and understanding of issues related to identity, spirituality and gender politics. Leading with the material and the inventive processes, she is a chronicler who weaves together inspiration and ideas from politics, feminism, and eastern philosophies. Using a self-invented technique, she calls ‘plucking’, Vedpathak spends hundreds of hours separating the fibers of handmade Japanese paper with a small pin. Vedpathak’s work has gained significant institutional recognition with a recent solo exhibition, ‘Time (Constant, Suspended, Collapsed)’ at Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan and an upcoming show ‘Subtleism: Neha Vedpathak with Agnes Martin’ at Cranbrook Art Museum, Michigan. Her work, ‘Still I Rise’ forms part of the permanent collection of Detroit Institute of Fine Arts and currently hangs in their new gallery of Indian and Southeast Asian art.
Upcoming and recent solo exhibitions include; ‘Subtleism – Neha Vedpathak with Agnes Martin’, Cranbrook Art Museum, Michigan (2024), ‘Neha Vedpathak - Ideally Imprecise’, Encounter, Lisbon (2024), ‘Neha Vedpathak: Creative Force,’ David Klein, Detroit (2023), ‘Neha Vedpathak: I Dwell in Possibility,’ Sundaram Tagore, Singapore (2022),‘ 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; ‘Sense of Materiality’, Sundaram Tagore, London (2023), ‘Artist Rooms’, Encounter, Lisbon (2023), ‘Invisible Threads’ Baker Art Museum, Florida (2022), ‘Fermata’ Encounter, London (2022), ‘Emerge’ National Indo American Museum, Lombard (2021), ‘What Remains’, Encounter, London, (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, US Embassy Hyderabad, Progressive Art Collection, Camac Art Centre, Czech Academy of Sciences, Bharat Bhavan Arts Center, Madhya Pradesh State Art Museum, Anderson Ranch Arts Centre.