DOMINO

Olivia Bax | James Collins | Daiga Grantina | Monique Mouton | Francis

Offman

24th May - 5th July 2025

In Domino, five international artists gather in the Lisbon light to start a dialogue through intuition and inquiry. Olivia Bax, James Collins, Daiga Grantina, Monique Mouton and Francis Offman approach material with a sense of instinct and momentum. They respond perceptively to the architectural qualities offered by this building. Like the careful placement of dominoes before the fall, this exhibition invites viewers to trace a line between the works, not necessarily linear, but as a continuation of echoes and reverberations.

The title implies a relational logic, particularly the way one work leans gently into another, suggesting a reaction of gestures, textures, and tones. Though varied in media and intent, each artist shares a sensibility for simple materials and forms. From dense deposits of paint and paper pulp to assemblages of everyday materials and gestural mark making in watercolour/pastel, there is an attempt to decode and make beauty of daily debris—whether through the construction of painted surface, the tension in sculptural form, or the layering of narrative within abstraction.

Olivia Bax’s vibrant, contoured sculpture and drawings anchor the physicality of the exhibition, their hand-wrought surfaces reveal an intimate choreography of labour and balance. Her practice is characterised by familiar elements such as hooks, handles or vessels incorporated into sculptures in unfamiliar ways. Bax generates her own paper pulp to cover and form over linear armatures. James Collins slows down the process of painting to mine moments of arrival and disappearance. His malleable use of paint is applied to appear both solid and fluid, impressing itself onto the support and spreading through built-up floodplains, depositing a rich sediment of references. Daiga Grantina’s sculptures are amorphous in form. Her works are reactive to their exhibited environment and invite natural light to be a protagonist that navigates volume and form at the point where perception and physicality intersect. Monique Mouton’s paintings are studies in nuance and balance, where edges dissolve and colour fields drift beyond their boundaries. Her use of colour can shift and spill from being ethereal and diluted to bold and dense. Francis Offman recycles gifted and collected materials including canvas, coffee grounds and pigment to contribute a tactile and historical density to the exhibition, incorporating materials that speak to migration, memory, and identity.

Together, the artists offer an open-ended conversation. Domino unfolds not as a narrative of cause and effect, but as a constellation of encounters, linked by colour, light and form.

Domino runs until 5th July 2025. 

Curation and text by Thomas Ellmer

Planning your Visit

Encounter, Rua de São Bernardo 15, R/C, 1200-823, Estrela, Lisboa

Wednesday - Saturday 12 - 7pm and by appointment

Olivia Bax

Olivia Bax (1988, Singapore) is a sculptor who brings things together, creating ensembles of found and made objects, held together by metal armatures, chicken wire, cardboard and paper pulp. Her handling of these materials runs with and departs from established sculptural processes, simultaneously constructing, welding and modelling, and using the metal armature both as an inner supporting structure and as an active component of the final sculpture itself, pushing through and out of the modelled paper pulp. As well as construct and model, Bax also paints, but rather than being applied at the end, her paint is mixed into the pulp from the very start. This means that she works with colour both as a painter and as a sculptor might, modelling colour as one might clay. (Jon Wood)

Bax completed an MFA Sculpture, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London 2014-16 and BA (Hons) Fine Art, Byam Shaw School of Art, London 2007-10. Recent solo exhibitions include; 'Olivia Bax', RIBOT Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2024), 'Handrailing', New Arts Centre in collaboration with Sid Motion Gallery, Roche Court (2024) Cavalcade, BoLee and Workman, Bruton, UK (2024), 'Floss', Holtermann Fine Art, London (2023), 'Monkey Cups', Southbank Centre, London, 'Home Range', Holtermann Fine Art, London (2022) 'Spill', L21, Palma de Mallorca, Spain (2021) 'Pah-d'-Bah', HS Projects, London (2020/21), 'Off Grid, Mark Tanner Sculpture Award Exhibition' Touring (2020).

Selected upcoming and recent group exhibitions include: ‘Domino’, Encounter (2025), 'These Mad Hybrids: John Hoyland and Contemporary Sculpture' Royal West of England Academy, Bristol (2024), 'Phantom Sculpture', Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry (2023), 'Confab Window, 2-person exhibition with Veronika Hilger', HATCH, Paris (2023) 'Eartheaters' , Lustwarande - Platform for Contemporary Sculpture, Tilburg, Netherlands (2023), 'Double Knowledge', Alice Black Gallery, London (2023), 'Khemeia', Nico Projects, London (2023), 'Search Party', Tatjana Pieters, Ghent (2023), 'Material Impressions: Artists & Paper', Larsen Warner, Stockholm (2023), 'The Ingram Collection: Revisiting Modern British Art', The Lightbox, Woking, UK (2023), 'The World We Live In: Art and the Urban Environment', Arts Council Collection Touring Exhibition: Leicester Museum & Art Gallery; Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery.

Bax's work is held in important public and private collections internationally including; Arts Council Collection, The Ingram Collection, Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, UCL Special Collections.

James Collins

James Collins (1992, London) works are shaped over extended periods and hold the history of their making in the dense painterly ground from which they emerge. The paintings possess a formal weight and palpable physicality in their encrusted, layered and labored surfaces. The essential viscosity of the compositions Collins renders, reflect a process of slow contemplation in which gradual thoughts are not only formed, but continually malleable and left reverberating on the edge of movement. The works operate like an active archeological site, in which the bones of ideas are perpetually dug out, brought to light, dusted and reburied to be later excavated again. The painted forms feel settled and established through large passages of time. Collins’ paintings expand and contract around a cognitive cartography particular to the artist. Similar to a stream of water impressing itself onto the earth or spreading through an ancient floodplain, the works slowly carve and reshape familiar routes, depositing a rich sediment of references as they journey through their painterly landscapes. The works are rooted in a syntax of recurring signs and symbols often interspersed in hidden pathways throughout their organic compositions. For instance, enduring motifs of the adjacent circle and square recur, sometimes rendered on the verge of lithic sculptural relief and at other moments hazily emerging through a veil of translucent color. Often a series of interwoven forms will catch the light, like the skeletal body of a buried fossil enticing the eye from within the face of a rock.

Collins graduated with a BA (Hons) from Wimbledon College of Art, London, in 2015 and Master of Arts (MA) from Royal College of Art, London, in 2017. Recent solo and dual exhibitions include; ‘Ground’, Workplace, London (2024), ‘James Collins – New Paintings’, Encounter, Lisbon (2023), ‘Occultation’ CAR Gallery, Bologne (2021), ‘14’ PM/AM, London (2021), ‘Penumbra’ Claas Reiss, London (2021).

Selected upcoming and recent group exhibitions include ‘Domino’, Encounter (2025), ‘Passages’, Encounter (2024), ‘Once, Then, Gone’ New Child Gallery, Belgium (2023), ‘The Reason For Painting’ Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, United Kingdom (2023), ‘Here and Long Ago’ Gerhard Hofland, Amsterdam (2023), ‘Alte Freunde, neue Freunde’ Claas Reiss, London (2021) ‘Hideaway’ Monti8, Latina (Italy), ‘Abstract with Figure’ at James Fuentes, New York (2020), ‘Lost & Found’ at Rod Barton in London (2017), ‘Duo’ at Galleri Jacob Bjørn in Aarhus, Denmark (2018) Collins was included in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2015 and the John Moore Painting Prize in 2016.

Collins work is included in the Simmons and Simmons Collection and can be found in important private collections in UK, Europe, America, Canada and New Zealand.

Daiga Grantina

Daiga Grantina (b. 1985, Saldus, LV) lives and works in Paris, France.

Grantina's sculptures investigate the encounters between materials and their consequent relationships of dissonance and consonance, inducing an exercise in expanded vision. Her material gestures resonate with the structural shifts of organisms and environments, navigating relations of volume and form at the point where microscopic and macroscopic overlap and intersect. Her abstract vocabulary borrows from bodies and landscapes to explore indescribable matter, a plastic investigation of the formless and misshapen. Intuitively concocted forms self-consume and self-produce, at once a continuous development of a shared idea and a space of tension where the hierarchies of perception find themselves rearranged.

Grantina studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg (2012) Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, AT (2010). Selected solo and duo exhibitions include: 'Leaves' Emalin, London (2025), 'Slide', MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique, Paris (2024), 'Notes on Kim Lim', curated by Daiga Grantina and Stefanie Gschwend, Kunstmuseum Appenzell, Appenzell, CH (2024), 'Four Sides of a Shadow', Z33, Hasselt, Belgium, BE (2024), 'Every day and just once', Daiga Grantina with Monika Sosnowska, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw PL (2024), Frieze London, Emalin, London, UK (2022), 'Lauka Telpa', Art Museum Riga Bourse, Riga, LV (2022), 'Moth Mothers', Palace Enterprise, Copenhagen, DK (2022), 'Learning From Feathers', Liebaert Projects, Kortrijk, BE (2021), 'Atem, Lehm “Fiato, Argilla”', GAMeC, Bergamo, IT (2021), 'Temples', Emalin, London, UK (2021), 'What Eats Around Itself', curated by Helga Christoffersen, New Museum, New York, NY, US (2020), 'Saules Suns', curated by Inga Lāce and Valentinas Klimašauskas, Latvian Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, IT (2019), 'Toll', curated by Sandra Adam-Couralet, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR (2018), 'Jardin des Pommes', Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris, FR, 'So Sun dog harena', curated by Gesine Borcherdt, CAPRI-Raum, Düsseldorf, DE (2017), 'Pillars Sliding off Coat-ee', curated by Rhea Dall, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg, DE (2017), 'KUB Billboards', curated by Eva Birkenstock, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, AT (2016), 'Flight Devidoor', Autocorrect, Vienna, AT (2016), 'Heap-Core,,,,' curated by Zane Onckule, Kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga, LV (2016), 'Basinger Beige', 83 Pitt Street, New York, NY, US (2016), 'Grotto from Glammar', Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris, FR (2016), 'LFL', Lundgren Gallery, Palma de Mallorca, ES (2016), 'The Mountain Guide', Mathew Gallery, Berlin, DE (2015), 'Legal Beast Language', Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris, FR (2014), 'Mouth Harness', curated by Stephanie Seidel, ba&d, Düsseldorf, DE (2014), 'scity-ox-tails', Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf, DE (2013), 'FUSE, FUSE' (Diana at her Bath), curated by Stephanie Seidel, NAK Neuer Aachen Kunstverein, Aachen, DE (2012), 'Strange Overtones', Hermes und der Pfau, Stuttgart, DE (2010).

Selected upcoming and recent group exhibitions include ‘Domino’, Encounter (2025), 'In the Name of Desire', Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, LV (2024), 'Of their time (7), A look at French private collections', Frac Grand Large, in partnership with ADIAF, Dunkirk, FR (2023), 'The Stuff of Life | The Life of Stuff', Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, UK, (2023), 'Inside Out', Kunstverein Göttingen, Göttingen, DE (2023), 'The Kick Inside', X Museum, Beijing, CN (2022).

Grantina's work is held in important public and private collections internationally including; CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, New York, US; CNAP Centre National Art Plastique, Pantin, FR; FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkirk, FR; GAMeC, Bergamo, IT; Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, CH; LNMM Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, LV; Tate, London, UK; and X Museum, Beijing, CN.

Monique Mouton

Monique Mouton (n. 1984, Fort Collins, Colorado) Lives and works in New York, New York.

Her practice involves creating sculptures using custom-made frames where paper is superficially the main medium. She explores the boundaries between discreetness and porosity through the preparation, fixation, and processing of paper, which includes cutting, dispersing fluids, and paints. Mouton's work focuses on how paintings can hover between different states while absorbing color into paper or wood panels, showcasing a stylistic approach that emphasizes the interplay between materials and surfaces.

Mouton holds a Master of Fine Arts, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2014), New York and a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver, British Columbia (2006).

Selected solo and duo exhibitions include: 'Monique Mouton & Covey Gong', Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2024), 'Art Basel Statements (solo booth)', Basel, Switzerland, (2024), 'Destiny Cornucopia: Nancy Lupo, Monique Mouton', VEDA, Florence, Italy (2022), 'INNER CHAPTERS', Bridget Donahue, New York, New York (2021), 'Braid', Veda, Florence, Italy (2020), 'Scene', Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles, California (2019), 'The Theme is Green', Bridget Donahue, New York, New York, (2018), 'A Place Partly Known', Natalia Hug, Cologne, Germany, (2017), Paramount Ranch, Agoura Hills, California, (2016), 'More Near', Bridget Donahue, New York, New York (2016), 'Pieces', Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Oregon (2014), 'Sides', Blanket Contemporary Art Inc., Vancouver, British Columbia, (2012), 'Pitch', Pamela, Los Angeles, California, (2011), 'New Shapes', Blanket Contemporary Art Inc., Vancouver, British Columbia (2009), 'Measure', Bodger’s and Kludger's Co-operative Art Parlour, Vancouver, British Columbia (2007).

Selected upcoming and recent group exhibitions include ‘Domino’, Encounter (2025), 'Remains', Bureau, New York, New York, New York (2024), 'she sleeps in light / we WILL save his soul', organized by Clay Hapaz, Loong Mah, New York, New York, (2024), 'True love sometimes requires a little lying', organized by Cooper Brovenick, 86 Walker Street, New York, New York, (2023), 'Regarding Kimber', Cheim & Read, New York, New York (2022), 'A Window is Also a Wall', Dunes, Portland, Oregon (2022), 'Gravity, A Proposal', Sikkema Jenkkins, New York, New York (2022), Looking Back: The 12th White Columns Annual, organized by Mary Manning, White Columns, New York, New York (2022), Palai, Palazzo Tamborino Cezzi, Lecce, Italy (2021), 'Goldie’s Gallery', organized by Trevor Shimizu, Long Island City, New York (2019), 'Goldie’s Gallery', Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich, Germany (2019), 'The Samovar', Overduin & Co., Los Angeles, California (2019), 'La terra piatta è la dimensione lirica di un luogo come se regredire fosse inventare', Octogan x Maroncelli 12, Milan, Italy (2019), 'Siobhan Liddell: Nobody's World', Gordon Robichaux, New York, New York (2019), '10 Year Anniversary Show', Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Oregon (2018), 'Tissue of Memory', Simon Lee, New York, New York (2018), 'How To Kill A Siren', The Boom Boom Room, In Limbo, Brooklyn, New York (2018).

Mouton’s work is held in important public and private collections internationally including Davis Museum, Wellesley College, US.

Francis Offman

Francis Offman (1987, Rwanda) lives and works in Bologna, Italy.

Francis Offman’s work reflects the ecology of the materials used, weaving personal memories and geohistorical narratives. His body of work intertwines traces while mapping new grounds. Sourcing materials from daily interactions and exchanges, each is intricately linked to its unique history. Whether it’s the plaster of Bologna anchoring his creations in his city of residence or the coffee, a reference to Rwanda – his country of origin, which, before reaching him, passes through dozens of different hands, forming a constellation of intimate connections and threads. Francis Offman’s art balances a culture of remembrance on personal, collective, and material-based levels.

Selected solo and duo exhibitions include: 'Still Grounded', Blank, Cape Town, South Africa (2025), 'Weaving Stories', Secession, Vienna, AT (2025), Castello San Basilio, Pisticci, IT (2025), 'Keep Looking', Deborah Schamoni, Munich, Germany (2024), 'Economics of Painting', Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, UK (2024), 'Francis Offman', Herald Street, Bethnal Green, London, UK (2023), Quotidiana: Paesaggio, La Quadriennale di Roma, Museo di Roma, Palazzo Braschi, Rome, IT (2022), 'Francis Offman', P420 Arte Contemporanea, Bologna, Italy (2021), 'Francis Offman', Herald Street, Museum Street, London, UK (2021).
Selected upcoming and recent group exhibitions include: ‘Domino’, Encounter (2025), 'Scaffolding', Herald Street, Bethnal Green, London, UK (2025), 'Norval Sovereign African Art Prize', Norval Foundation, Cape Town, ZA (2024), 'The Invention of Europe. A tricontinental narrative (2024-2027)', Kunst Meran, Merano, IT (2024), 'All the Lovers: Editions from 30 Years of Gasworks', David Zwirner, London, UK (2024), 'My Dreams Were Dashed Against Your Walls', DEO projects, Chios, GR (2024), 'Artists Making Books: Pages of Refuge', American Academy in Rome, Rome, IT (2024), 'Ouverture', Castello de Rivoli, Turin, IT (2024) 'Arte circolare', MAXXI, Rome, IT (2023), 'Recent Acquisitions and Eternal Loves - Part I', Nicoletta Fiorucci Collection, Rose de France, Monaco, MC (2023), 'Their Volumes - Works from the Cristella Collection', Gruppo Cristella, Cortemaggiore, IT (2023), 'The Reason for Painting', Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, UK (2023), 'Moya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things', Tate Liverpool, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK (2023), 'Museo delle Opacità', Museo delle Civiltà Romana, Rome, IT (2023), 'De Profundis: Oscar Wilde', L’Hotel, Paris, FR (2023), 'Italian Painting Today, Triennale Milano, Milan, IT (2023), 'Oh So Quiet… Material Mediations on Abstraction', WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, ZA (2023), 'Sensing Painting. Opere dalla Collezione d’arte della Fondazione CRC', Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin, IT (2023), Palazzo Collicola Biblioteca Carandente, Spoleto, IT (2023), 'La Biblioteca del Mondo', Fondazione Memmo, Rome, IT (2023).

Offman's work is held in important public and private collections internationally including; Frac Bretagne, Rennes, FR The Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna, IT MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, Rome, IT Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin, IT The University of Warwick Art Collection, Coventry, UK The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, US.