Neha Vedpathak
In Awe
26th September - 14th November 2026 | Opening: Saturday, 26th September, 4-7pm
Rua De São Bernardo 15 R/C, Lisbon
It is with awe
That I beheld
Fresh leaves, green leaves,
Bright in the sun.
Matsuo Bashō 1689 from Narrow Road to the Deep North (Oku no Hosomichi)
Encounter is pleased to present Neha Vedpathak (India, 1982), ‘In Awe’, opening on Saturday 26th September, 2026, from 4 to 7pm. This solo exhibition, the artist’s second with the gallery, weaves together a body of new works including a recent large-scale piece ‘Of Light’ (2026), which casts intricate shadows through the gallery’s main exhibition space. Following a period of uncertainty due to health concerns, this celebratory exhibition comes at a critical moment for the artist, her symbolic ‘Spectrum’ (2026) and ‘Absence’ (2026) series marking an existential reflection on the states of mind which shape our encounters with the world.
Holding the history of their making in their intuitive compositions, Vedpathak’s evocative pieces unsettle boundaries between painting, drawing and installation. Evoking lace like webs in their shape-shifting organic structures, Vedpathak’s haptic pieces operate as active receptacles of time, mapping imprints of memory and sensation in their material fabric. Like generative nets her works carry diverse histories of abstraction in their hovering grids and portals. In Vedpathak’s layered practice, multiple threads of critical inquiry and cultural signification intersperse and mesh, interweaving narratives that touch on bodily trace, identity and temporality. As such, the fragmentary is constantly reconstituted in offbeat rhythms, a distinct energy flows through the material’s porous skin.
The artist employs a rigorous self-developed technique she refers to as ‘plucking’, which involves separating the fibres of sheets of handmade Japanese mulberry paper using a tiny pushpin. This method, developed in 2009, subverts the expected limitations of her medium to expand our perception and open possibility. There is a distinctly spiritual aspect to Vedpathak’s laborious rhythmic process in which time itself becomes an integral medium in the work. 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, in which the material is transformed into a new entity through thousands of recurring interventions, sits somewhere between meditation and obsession for Vedpathak. Acting as sites of both resistance and yield, the critical force of Vedpathak’s radical materiality consciously challenges traditional associations of craft and the domestic. Through deliberate action and sustained critical attention, the works’ intricate and scarred surfaces offer intimate spaces for reflection.
The transcendent meditative quality of Vedpathak’s making process is echoed in the vertiginous experience of close looking. There is something unsettling, disembodying, and therefore implicitly generative, about an experience that refuses to be restrained by the mind’s usual patterns; like a familiar word or chant repeated until it becomes strange in the mouth, its meaning first lost and then re-found and made new. For instance, Vedpathak’s ‘Attention’ watercolours (2009) - which emerged from a performance entitled ‘Drawing as Sculpture’ - play with this idea of transformation through repetitive action. Imperfections and subtle shifts in emphasis are heightened through their repetitive strokes. From the minute to the monumental, once immersed in Vedpathak’s material topography we are detached from the moorings of the familiar by the suggestion of the infinite. A sense of vastness and wonder at the unstoppable tide of time is conjured through Vedpathak’s constellations of irregular individual gestures which subtly build to form a reverberating mass.
The etymology of the word ‘wonder’ has been often related to ‘wound’ and it is in this thin veil and permeable threshold between body and mind that Vedpathak’s works hold their quiet power. In the words of 13th-century Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, ‘the wound is the place where the light enters you’.
Neha Vedpathak ‘In Awe’ will run until 14th November 2026.
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 Chicago-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, ‘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; ‘In Awe’, Encounter, Lisbon (2026, upcoming), ‘In Plain Sight’, Sundaram Tagore, Singapore (2026), ‘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; ‘Undertones’, Encounter, Lisbon (2026) 'Into the Abstract', Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum, Vermont, US (2025), ‘The Sea and the Sky, and You and I’, the Shepherd, Michigan (2025), ‘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; Cranbrook Art Museum, 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.