We are pleased to present Pinaree Sanpitak’s second solo exhibition with Tyler Rollins Fine Art, taking place from April 19 through June 1, 2012. Pinaree 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 women’s 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.
Entitled Hanging by a Thread, the exhibition centers on a installation of the same title that is the artist’s response to the recent flooding in Bangkok, where she lives and works. Using traditional Thai printed cotton Paa-Lai fabrics of the type that were included in the royal sponsored relief bags, Pinaree has constructed a group of woven hammocks that will be suspended in the gallery from slender threads. These quite, cocoon-like forms evoke a sense of nurturing, refuge, and contemplation, as well as the precariousness of life. Pinaree explains that “the Paa-Lai hammocks represent the situation of precarious times balancing traditional and modern values. The hammocks are presence of the body, bare and contemplating. The body waiting to slow down. The body floating. The body just hanging by a thread. Thus a situation I believe we all share.” Also included in the exhibition is Bare Silhouettes, a new series of embroidered works on silk panels that reference Pinaree’s 1998-99 Womanly Abstract series through the bare female form of these simple patterns.
The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, will present a solo exhibition of Pinaree’s work from October 10 to December 30, 2012, featuring her large-scale installation, Temporary Insanity. Also this year, she will participate in the 18th Biennale of Sydney (June 27 – September 16, 2012), with a major installation at the new wing of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. The biennale announcement explains: “An expansive new double-height space will be dedicated to a work by Pinaree Sanpitak, one of Thailand’s few internationally recognized female artists. Sanpitak presents Anything Can Break (2011), an installation of hundreds of origami cubes and breast-shaped glass clouds suspended from the ceiling. Illuminated by fibre optics, the cubes and clouds are lined with motion sensors that trigger music in response to the audience’s movement.”
Pinaree’s 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. She presented her first New York solo exhibition, Quietly Floating, at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in March 2010. In 2011, she participated in a number of group exhibitions at museums around the world, including: Here / Not Here at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; Roundabout at City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand, and traveling to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and Negotiating Home, History, and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia, 1991-2011 at the Singapore Art Museum. Her work was also featured in a solo exhibition, Body Borders, at the Art Center at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.
