Exhibitions | James Collins
Deltas | Encounter Lisboa
20 March - 16 May
Encounter is pleased to present James Collins – ‘Deltas’, opening on Thursday 19th March 2026. The exhibition marks Collins' second solo show with the gallery and brings together a body of recent paintings produced between 2024–26.
Deltas form where rivers begin to slow and reshape as they evolve into different bodies of water. Under the right conditions, layers of fertile sediment build up until ground visibly breaks the surface, introducing alternate spaces and routes in these changeable sites. Collins' abstract paintings echo this process — carving foundations and reforming pathways, they deposit a rich array of references as they journey through their painterly landscapes.
Each work is rooted in a syntax of recurring structures, forms particular to Collins. His compositions are constructed, excavated and dispersed repeatedly until an image starts to take shape. Built from latent traces and established over large passages of time, the paintings hold the history of their making in the dense ground from which they emerge. The works operate like a covered archaeological site, but one in which new forms grow over the scars of the land. Accumulated weight, arrangement of space and encrusted surfaces suggest underlying matter. Foundational lines and directional planes are left poised on the edge of tidal movement.
In this body of work Collins investigates the relationship between alchemy and objecthood in painting through his unique manipulation and moulding of surface and edge. Through interplays with oil, oil bar and raw pigment — alongside the use of unconventional tools for mark making — Collins pushes paint into foreign terrains. It becomes an unknowable substance. The paintings appear formed from living matter. Enigmatic deltas, operating within their own logic, both inside and outside of time.
The exhibition runs until 16th May 2026
Domino | Encounter Lisboa
Olivia Bax | James Collins | Daiga Grantina
Monique Mouton | Francis Offman
24 May - 5 July 2025
Courtesy of the Artist and Encounter
Courtesy of the Artist and Encounter
Courtesy of the Artist and Encounter
Courtesy of the Artist and Encounter
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
Courtesy of the Artist and Encounter
James Collins (centre), Anderson Borba (floor) and Biraaj Dodiya (right)
Courtesy of the Artist and Encounter
Ground | Workplace
12 April – 25 May 2024
Courtesy of the Artist and Workplace
Courtesy of the Artist and Workplace
Made deliberately and slowly, often over several years, James Collins employs additive means to excavate shapes and forms that emerge from within and beneath, as if always there. In his meticulous, densely layered paintings, gradual accretions of oil are built into mounds, furrows, and channels, becoming topographical sites of intense colour.
Deep, pearlescent beetle-black blues withhold and reflect light, whilst seemingly earthen browns - on closer inspection - emit spectral patchworks of luminescence. For Collins, paint is alchemical. In the laboratory of his Darlington studio in Northern England, pigment and medium are mixed and melded to create impossibly chromatic hues that shift constantly with the changing light, and as one moves around them.
Challenging the idea of painting as pictorial space, Collins insists on the paradoxical nature of painting both as surface and as event. As objects, his paintings resist narrative and interpretation, remaining absolute in their immediacy, confronting the viewer with the fact of their materiality. Simultaneously, his paintings require the viewer to succumb to spatial and temporal dislocation - to be transported by, and with, each painting – as if through the unknowable reaches of deep time: through epochs, civilisations, and evolution. Through singular, glacial intent, Collins reveals foundational, archetypal forms, primordial signifiers of the great arc of existence.
James Collins | New Paintings | Encounter
24 November - January 27 2024
Installation View - New Paintings at Encounter, Lisboa, 2023-24
Courtesy of the Artist and Encounter
Courtesy of the Artist and Encounter
Courtesy of the Artist and Encounter
Courtesy of the Artist and Encounter
Courtesy of the Artist and Encounter
Encounter
is pleased to present James Collins – New Paintings opening on Thursday
23rd November 2023. The exhibition is the artist’s first solo show in
Portugal and brings together a collection of recent works created over
2020-23. This selection is representative of the distinct visual
language for which Collins has become recognized, whilst also marking a
significant development in the language of the paintings. Through his
material preoccupation with the inherent logic of painting and ongoing
experimentation with the alchemy of paint, the diverse and enigmatic
objects Collins forms have taken on a fresh agency.
Collins’ 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 plays with the alchemy of painting, which is apparent through his unusual rendering and merging of raw pigment and oil paint. Through this meticulous process, he utilizes the transformative power of paint, to open up new spaces of possibility. By pushing the material into foreign spaces, paint becomes an unknowable substance, bordering on the otherworldly. Consequently, the paintings appear to be formed from living matter both inside and outside of time. The works enigmatic materiality conjures a diverse range of associations from cellular structures to the ethereal blue glow of bioluminescent algae rising to the surface of the ocean at night. The use of a historically loaded medium such as ‘oil on canvas’ inevitably nods to numerous resonant pictorial histories of 20th century painting. Yet, Collins’ works travel beyond these marked associations into a vocabulary which is distinctively his. New Paintings runs until the 27th of January 2024.
Collins’ 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 plays with the alchemy of painting, which is apparent through his unusual rendering and merging of raw pigment and oil paint. Through this meticulous process, he utilizes the transformative power of paint, to open up new spaces of possibility. By pushing the material into foreign spaces, paint becomes an unknowable substance, bordering on the otherworldly. Consequently, the paintings appear to be formed from living matter both inside and outside of time. The works enigmatic materiality conjures a diverse range of associations from cellular structures to the ethereal blue glow of bioluminescent algae rising to the surface of the ocean at night. The use of a historically loaded medium such as ‘oil on canvas’ inevitably nods to numerous resonant pictorial histories of 20th century painting. Yet, Collins’ works travel beyond these marked associations into a vocabulary which is distinctively his. New Paintings runs until the 27th of January 2024.
The Reason for Painting, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre
The Art Riot Collective, Betsy Bradley, James Collins, Pam Evelyn, Jadé Fadojutimi, Rachel Jones, Harminder Judge, Melike Kara, Rob Lyon, Oscar Murillo, Ruairiadh O’Connell, Francis Offman, Mary Ramsden and Sam Windett.
4 May – 25 June 2023
Installation View, The Reason For Painting at Warwick Arts Centre, Birmingham, UK, 2023
James Collins (left) and Jade Fadojutimi (right)
Courtesy of the Artist and Warwick Arts Centre
James Collins (left) and Jade Fadojutimi (right)
Courtesy of the Artist and Warwick Arts Centre
Liquid Engineers 39, Acrylic and Oil on Canvas, 90 x 70cm, 2021
Courtesy of the Artist and Warwick Arts Centre
Courtesy of the Artist and Warwick Arts Centre
Installation View, The Reason For Painting at Warwick Arts Centre, Birmingham, UK, 2023
Rachel Jones (left), Betsy Bradley (centre) and Ruairiadh O`Connell (right)
Courtesy of the Artist and Warwick Arts Centre
Rachel Jones (left), Betsy Bradley (centre) and Ruairiadh O`Connell (right)
Courtesy of the Artist and Warwick Arts Centre
Installation View, The Reason For Painting at Warwick Arts Centre, Birmingham, UK, 2023
Rob Lyon (left), Pam Evelyn (centre) and The Art Riot Collective (right)
Courtesy of the Artist and Warwick Arts Centre
Rob Lyon (left), Pam Evelyn (centre) and The Art Riot Collective (right)
Courtesy of the Artist and Warwick Arts Centre
The Reason for Painting intends to create a space to be uplifted, intrigued, liberated and to momentarily escape the social and economic crisis we are living in today. This exhibition brings together a diverse group of younger artists who share their experiences of experimenting with colour, mark and form, to create moments of joy.
Varying in scale, these artists’ works are intense, intuitive, and expressive. Others are contemplative and logical, presenting large fields of colour. Their inspirations include Tantra, Wabi Sabi, Arte Povera, Kurdish Ritual and Mono-ha.
These works of art redefine what abstract means. They can be seen as a two-way encounter between the artist and the viewer. Each of these artists defy creative conventions to unleash a new confidence in abstraction.
Artists of this exhibition include: The Art Riot Collective, Betsy Bradley, James Collins, Pam Evelyn, Jadé Fadojutimi, Rachel Jones, Harminder Judge, Melike Kara, Rob Lyon, Oscar Murillo, Ruairiadh O’Connell, Francis Offman, Mary Ramsden and Sam Windett.