Body beautiful: Pinaree Sanpitak shows in Singapore
The works of internationally acclaimed Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak go on show this week at Singapore’s Yavuz Gallery in the solo exhibition “Bodily Space: Confessed and Concealed”.
Over the past 30 years, Pinaree’s practice has expanded from painting and collage to other media, spanning sculpture, installation, print and participatory projects. Undergirding this diverse practice is her consistent engagement with the human body as a key thematic subject and iconography. Distilled into primal and minimal forms, the body is always present corporeally, viscerally occupying space.
In some works, it is represented as a corpus — two curving lines alluding to a torso without beginning or end. Mostly, the body is fragmented into exposed and disjoined parts, with the female breast a recurring motif. The sensuality of her works, the term speaking both to the erotic and the sensorial, is derived from this delineation of the body as unconcealed and uncontainable.
In “Bodily Space: Confessed and Concealed”, the artist returns to her original medium of painting and collage, continuing her experimentation with painting using organic materials and collaging with fabrics.
The expressive force of the works is found in their complex interplay of form, line, colour, and texture. Incorporating material elements from her previous works, alongside paper and textiles that the artist has collected, these paintings function as mementoes and repositories of memory. Together, they reflect Sanpitak’s present state of mind, revealing a wider, more tender and more profound treatment of the body as subject and form.
Accompanying the exhibition is an illustrated catalogue with an essay by Vipash Purichanont, an independent curator and lecturer at the department of Art History at Silpakorn University, Bangkok.
Aside from solo and group exhibitions in galleries worldwide, Pinaree’s works have been shown in numerous museums and biennales. Her recent site-specific installations include The Roof, commissioned by Arts Brookfield, at the Brookfield Place Winter Garden in Battery Park City in New York, USA in 2017; and Breast Stupa Topiary at Jim Thompson Farm, Thailand in 2018.
The opening reception for “Bodily Space: Confessed and Concealed” is this Saturday (October 12) from 4 to 7pm at the gallery. The exhibition continues through November 17.
