Whitney McVeigh

Paths Converge: Infinite Strange Shapes

23.5. - 1.8.26

Opening: Saturday, 23rd May, 4-7pm

Encounter is pleased to present Whitney McVeigh, Paths Converge: Infinite Strange Shapes, opening on Saturday 23rd May 2026. The exhibition, which coincides with a recent publication by the artist of the same title (published by Sylph Editions), marks McVeigh's first solo exhibition in Portugal and weaves together a diverse collection of works from 2000-2026.

Concerned with contemplative spaces and sites of accumulated trace and memory, McVeigh brings together for this exhibition found objects drawn from her personal collection, alongside ink-on-paper paintings and drawings that dialogue with sculptures, photographs, and texts created during residencies in China, South Africa, India, Brazil, and Kyrgyzstan over the last 25 years. Fundamentally engaged with ‘the archaeology of memory’, McVeigh sensitively intervenes into resonant objects and ‘maps’ temporal figures and archaic landscapes, continuously exploring the unfolding of history as a channel for our personal and collective experience.

The artist has been working with ink on paper for over 30 years and through an intimate collaboration with the medium, seeks to open-up intuitive refined languages in painting. Often McVeigh’s lyrical works explore and extend the potential and fluidity of the material, utilising mark making as a vehicle for psychic form, inner worlds and the sacred. For the artist, ‘even the drawn line itself becomes a vehicle for memory’. As we find ourselves in the works, images seem to form themselves, suggesting unconscious spaces and steering us between abstraction and figuration, the physical and spiritual worlds. Preoccupied with the dual layers of the body, paintings such as Creatures of Another World (2023) and Holding (2023), created on xuan paper in Beijing, form visual languages rooted in both Eastern and Western philosophy, brushing against diverse practices from calligraphy to Abstract Expressionism and European Expressionism. Extending her concern with the relationship between text, imprint and embodiment, in Light of the Body (2010), McVeigh sensitively inscribes an archetypal human form on a page of a 150-year-old Chinese herbal medical book. The drawing’s timeless figure is both open and closed, formed of a single cyclical line; it acts as a container, a guide, and a vehicle through which energy flows.

Over a thirty-year period, McVeigh has amassed a collection of found objects, weighted by their unique patternations, tracing former lives. This exhibition will include Harmonium, a found early 20th Century instrument from India with artist intervention. The work's presentation is both surreal and suggestive of the domestic. No longer a container of music, it now acts as a potent fragment, a storehouse for remembered touch and expression. McVeigh acts as a custodian of these psychologically layered objects. The artist entrusts the Harmonium to intrinsically reflect and spur philosophical understandings of archive, presence and absence. Elements of the artist’s collection have been exhibited at institutions including Getty Villa (LA), Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge), Summerhall (Edinburgh) and The Gervasuti Foundation, (Venice).

Paths Converge: Infinite Strange Shapes marks a poetic conversation between timeless subjects, places and forms. McVeigh was born in New York and after several decades working globally from a base in London is now building a studio space dedicated to memory and archive in Southern France.

The exhibition will run until 1st August 2026.

Biography

Whitney McVeigh (born NY, 1968) is a contemporary visual artist best known for her paintings and installation art. She has travelled extensively to carry out her practice and held residencies in Brazil, Mexico, India, China and South Africa. Her work investigates personal and collective memory and alludes to the layering of time. Her paintings are preoccupied with the complexity and dual layers of the body and explore languages with origins in Eastern and Western philosophy. Over a twenty-year period the artist has amassed a collection of objects in the studio weighted by their unique patternations; tracing former lives and the once tangible relationship an individual may have had with the object. As an artist, she acts as custodian of these ‘markers’, isolating yet elevating the materials, entrusting them to reflect and spur philosophical understandings of history, time and memory.

Whitney McVeigh was featured in the BBC Four television documentary Where is Modern Art Now (2009), presented by Gus Casely-Hayford alongside Sir Anthony Caro, Michael Landy, Grayson Perry and Cornelia Parker. She was nominated for the Sovereign European Art Prize (2008) by Saatchi Gallery director, Rebecca Wilson. Simon Schama’s catalogue essay, The Happenstance of Illumination, for the solo exhibition Elegy to Nature (2018, Eykyn Maclean), is published in his book of essays, Wordy (Simon & Schuster, 2019). Her work features in the anthology Imagined Spaces, edited by Kirsty Gunn & Gail Low (Voyage Out Press & Saraband Books, 2020). In Autumn 2022, a new collection of McVeigh’s limited editions was launched at Renzo Piano Building Workshops’s newly designed building Shard Place (London). Paths Converge, Infinite Strange Shapes, the artist’s collected writings, was published by Sylph Editions in October, 2025.

Selected solo exhibitions include; Paths Converge: Infinite Strange Shapes, Encounter, Lisbon (2026- upcoming), Temporality, Cardi Gallery, Online (2020), What is Worthwhile Doing in this World, Mount Stuart Visual Arts, Scotland (2019), Elegy to Nature, Eykyn Maclean, New York (2018), Language of Memory, Summerhall Arts, Edinburgh (2016), Contours, Hazard Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2015), Inventory: Invisible Companion, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2015), New Work, Michael Goedhuis, London (2015) and presentation of the film ‘Birth’: Origins at the end of life at the Royal Academy, London (2015), Hunting Song, Gervasuti Foundation, 55th Venice Bienalle, (2013), Dialogue, David Krut Gallery, New York (2011), Archaeology of Memory, SMAC Gallery and Nirox Foundation, South Africa (2011). Selected recent group exhibitions include, Re-Naissance, Unit London, online (2023), Fermata, Encounter, London (2021), Photo London, Somerset House, London (2021) with Encounter, What Remains, Encounter, London (2021), Artist Rooms, Encounter, London (2020), Shapes in Clouds, Encounter, London (2019), Plato in LA: Contemporary Artists’ Visions, Getty Villa, Los Angeles (2018), Not a Single Story, The Wanas Konst Foundation, Sweden with Nirox Foundation, South Africa (2018), Culture Lines: Sans Frontieres, Metamatic-Taf Foundation, Athens (2016), Unlocking the Diary, The Archiving of Nameless Memories, Folkestone Triennial, Kent (2014), Light Switch featured online at the Serpentine Gallery’s Extinction Marathon (2014) Glass Stress, White Light/White Heat, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013).

Read Interview: 'Archeology Of Memory', Whitney McVeigh in conversation with Alexander Caspari

'Whitney McVeighPaths Converge: Infinite Strange Shapes' Prose, poems, drawings, photographs 1994-2025

Whitney McVeigh

'Paths Converge: Infinite Strange Shapes'