Yavuz Gallery is proud to announce its participation at Art Basel Miami Beach’s 20-year anniversary edition, with a solo presentation in the Nova sector by leading Thai-artist Pinaree Sanpitak (b. 1961). Titled breasts, bodies, vessels, clouds, stupas, our showcase debuts a selection of new medium-sized paintings and a sculptural installation that continues Sanpitak’s conceptual concerns on the human body, the feminine experience and selfhood.
A series of specially commission paintings rendered in a monochromatic scheme of silver, white and brown feature Sanpitak’s recurring motifs in painting form – breasts, vessels, clouds and stupas, continuing her exploration on how the human form holds a multitude of unique experiences. The woman body often evolve into these forms in Sanpitak’s extrapolation of its manifold symbolism. Employing a variety of mediums on the surface of her canvases are etched pencil marks and layered papers on over Sanpitak’s monochromatic planes that emanate a resolute quietude, an insistence, and an eternal eloquence through form and materiality.
Dominating the centre of breasts, bodies, vessels, clouds, stupas is a large-scale installation, consisting of numerous miniature sculptures in Sanpitak’s iconic ‘Breast Stupa’ form. The multicoloured and numerous sculptures laid on a table, transforms the booth into a form of the domestic. Each sculpture in the installation is hand-fabricated using torn stacks of natural Mulberry paper shaped into a ‘Breast Stupa’, a form Sanpitak created that melds together the woman’s breast with a Buddhist site of veneration, the stupa (shrine). Presented in colours such as white, black, blue and red, placed on top of a household table, the work pays homage to home and the essence of domestic living.
As the artist states, “[my work] incorporates many senses of being. The repetition is a form of meditation, a way of looking into my body and mind. And by using different materials, the works offer subtle changes in definition with each substance. It is an evolving self-defining and self-healing process”. Taken together, our presentation is a powerful testament to womanhood, and a complex examination on how the human form can hold a myriad of tender, poetic expressions and experiences that are multifarious; akin to the human condition of changing and adapting with time.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sanpitak is widely regarded as one of Southeast Asia’s most important contemporary artists. In the 1990s, her groundbreaking exhibition “Breast Works” marked the start of the artist’s reference to an emergent and defining iconography: the female breast. Over the years, she has produced an expansive and compelling body of work across diverse media including painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, installation and performance. Underpinning her practice is an abiding fascination with the potentiality of the body, her own body as sensate space, and her lived experience as a woman.
Sanpitak is participating in the main exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani at the 59th Venice Biennale. She is currently part of the ongoing Bangkok Art Biennale, with two major installation works titled Temporary Insanity and Anything Can Break. Earlier this year, Sanpitak was also invited to create site-specific commissions for A Spirit of Gift, A Place of Sharing, Hancock Shaker Village Museum’s first major exhibition of contemporary Asian Art, in Massachusetts (May – Nov 2022).
Her works are part of important institutional collections worldwide, including: LACMA (USA), Asian Art Museum San Francisco (USA), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (USA), Nasher Museum of Art (USA), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (Australia), Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (Japan), Arter–Vehbi Koç Foundation (Turkey), amongst many others.