Art Basel OVR: Pioneers

One of a hundred selected galleries, Yavuz Gallery showcases a solo presentation by Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak, in Fragmented Bodies: 1995 — 2020. Fragmented Bodies: 1995 — 2020 presents a collection of installation, sculpture, drawing and painting that have defined the celebrated Thai artist’s practice exploring the bodily form as a vessel of experience and perception over the past three-and-a-half decades.

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, which Sanpitak has become renowned for. The recurring breast motif is distilled into the basic form of vessel and mound, which she relates to imagery of the Buddhist stupa (shrine) and offering bowl. Sanpitak correlates it to primal and sacred forms in nature, Thai tradition and culture, and Buddhist architecture and practices. Over the years, Sanpitak has redefined notions surrounding the human body (transcending the female breast), looking at the bodily form as a vessel of experience and perception, and the sense of the body in space and the perceived iconographic and conceptual associations they may trigger. Her sensorial inquiries also reveal a keen sensitivity towards a range of materials, and she has produced an expansive and compelling body of work across diverse media and techniques including painting, collage, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance. Underpinning Sanpitak’s practice is an abiding fascination with the potentiality of the body, her own body as sensate space, her lived experience of the bodily as a woman and, more recently, the charged and often convivial space between and among bodies that her participatory works create.

Highlights of the presentation include an early drawing The Breasts, Breast Works II (1995); Temporary Insanity (2004), a moving installation of gender-ambiguous soft sculptures presented at Jim Thompson Art Center, “Thai Art Festival” at Mairie du 6 e, St. Sulpice, Paris, “Nuit Blanche”, Brussels, and AMOA-Arthouse Austin; Anything Can Break (2011), an interactive installation traversing across glass, paper sculpture and performance that has been exhibited at the 18th Sydney Biennale, Chrysler Museum of Art, Toledo Museum of Art, Art Wuzhen and Bangkok Art and Culture Center; and The Hammock (2014/15), a glass installation produced as part of Sanpitak’s 2014 Guest Artist Pavilion artist residency at the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion in Ohio, USA .