Museum MACAN has acquired an extensive body of work by Pinaree Sanpitak

11 Apr 2024

Ames Yavuz is delighted to share that Museum MACAN has acquired an extensive body of work by Pinaree Sanpitak. Spanning almost a decade of her practice, this acquisition represents an in-depth showcase of Sanpitak’s ongoing fascination with the breast as a symbol of bodily and spiritual nourishment. Museum MACAN’s acquisition includes several of Sanpitak’s best-known works, such as the towering, stainless steel ‘Breast Stupa Topiary’ (2013) and the ethereal ‘Offering Vessel’ that was shown as part of the 59th Venice Biennale exhibition ‘The Milk of Dreams’ (2022). Each work expresses Sanpitak’s central leitmotif of the breast, in a range of enigmatic abstractions and moving deftly between stupas, vessels, mounds, and subtly curved profiles.

Born in 1961, Bangkok, Sanpitak is one of the most established conceptual artists of her generation. Her artistic practice revolves around the human body and form as a vessel of experience and perception. A recurring motif in her work, the female breast is distilled into its basic form of vessel and mound, resembling the Buddhist stupa (shrine) and offering bowl on occasion. Her sensorial inquiries also reveal a keen sensitivity towards a range of materials such as textiles, glass, ceramic and metal, informing her various approaches in collage, drawing, painting, printmaking, and sculpture. This results in an astoundingly varied and innovative body of work.

Beyond the breast-stupa, other organic forms make their appearances across the prints as well. Permuted in a range of colours, composition, and even paper material (in some cases, handmade mulberry paper, with mulberry fibre being a component of traditional Thai handmade paper), each work is suggestive of a different reading of the generative shapes. One can elucidate a range of concerns such as from the personal, to genderedness and womanhood, and to being-in-the-world and sacredness. This fluidity in interpretation prompts us to be in deeper engagement with the world we inhabit. 

Artwork: Pinaree Sanpitak, Offering Vessel, 2021, acrylic, pencil on canvas, 250 x 250 cm