Tyler Rollins Fine Art is pleased to announce the participation of Pinaree Sanpitak in the 18th Biennale of Sydney. Her major installation, Anything Can Break, will be on view in the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) from June 27 through September 16, 2012. Installed in a double height gallery of the museumâs new wing, the installation comprises hundreds of origami âflying cubesâ and breast-shaped glass clouds suspended from the ceiling. Illuminated by fiber optics, the cubes and clouds are lined with motion sensors that trigger musical motifs in response to the audienceâs movement.
Pinaree Sanpitak is one of the most compelling and respected Thai artists of her generation, and her work can be counted among the most powerful explorations of womenâs experience in all of Southeast Asia. For well over twenty years, her primary inspiration has been the female body, distilled to its most basic forms and imbued with an ethereal spirituality. The quiet, Zen-like abstraction of her work owes something to her training in Japan and sets it somewhat apart from the colorful intensity of much Thai art. Her rigorous focus on the female form, explored through a variety of media â painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, performance, and culinary arts, to name but a few â has resulted in an astoundingly varied and innovative body of work. A central motif of her work has long been the female breast, which she relates to imagery of the natural world and to the iconic forms of the Buddhist stupa (shrine) and offering bowl. Often called a feminist or Buddhist artist, she resists such easy categorizations, preferring to let her work speak to each viewer directly, to the heart and soul, with the most basic language of form, color, and texture. Her work is not lacking in a conceptual framework, but it is one informed primarily by a deeply felt spiritual sense rather than by rigid dogmas or ideological constructs.
Pinareeâs work has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions in Asia and Europe during the past twenty years, and she has participated in major biennials in Australia, Italy, Japan, and Korea. In 2011, her work was seen in institutions around the world, including: Here / Not Here at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; Roundabout at City Gallery Wellington in New Zealand and traveling to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Negotiating Home, History, and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia, 1991-2011 at the Singapore Art Museum; and Body Borders: Anything Can Break at the Art Center at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. She has presented two solo exhibitions at Tyler Rollins Fine Art: Quietly Floating (2010) and Hanging by a Thread (2012). Later this year, the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Viriginia, will present a solo exhibition of her work (October 15 – December 30, 2012), featuring her large-scale installation, Temporary Insanity.
