Neha Vedpathak – In Awe

Encounter presents Neha Vedpathak's solo exhibition In Awe, featuring new works including the large-scale piece Of Light and the symbolic Spectrum and Absence series. About Encounter is pleased to present Neha Vedpathak (India, 1982), 'In Awe', opening on Saturday 26th September 2026. 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, with 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 often been related to 'wound' and it is in this thin veil, the 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'. Read more Toggle Mixed media Installation Sculpture Drawing