Yavuz Gallery to Launch New Sydney Space with Pinaree Sanpitak Show

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Sanpitak’s exhibition features sculptures and paintings of the ‘breast stupa’, the artist’s most celebrated formal invention.

Yavuz Gallery will present works by Thai artist Pinaree Sanpitak in the first exhibition at their new Sydney space next month.

Sanpitak’s solo exhibition The Body and The Vessel opens in Surry Hills on 10 September and continues until 8 October. It is Pinaree’s first solo presentation in Australia in over eight years.

A key work in the exhibition is the installation The Affairs of Serving (2020–21), which consists of handmade mulberry paper ‘breast stupas’. These are placed on mid-century serving trolleys (think of the rolling liquor cabinets on Mad Men) atop various vessels including cups, bowls, vases, and jugs.

Sanpitak was born in Bangkok in 1961 and attended university in Japan and Australia. She began making ‘breast works’ in the mid-90s, coining the term ‘breast stupas’ in 2001 for an installation of silk forms she suspended from the ceiling. She has since experimented with ‘breast stupa cookery’ and ‘breast stupa topiary’.

On her use of the breast stupa form, Sanpitak has said, ‘Not one iteration is the same, which excites me. I don’t know the outcome. It’s a good practice of trust and letting go. And that is why I keep on at it.’

In the upcoming show at Yavuz Sydney, Sanpitak develops connections between the body and the spirit in paintings depicting a vessel, a breast, a stupa, and a torso. She considers how human bodies house our experiences, memories, and souls.

Yavuz Gallery Founder Can Yavuz told Ocula Magazine that Sanpitak’s three decades of work encompassed in the show ‘redefines the notions surrounding the human body (transcending the female breast), looking at the bodily form as a vessel of experience and expression, and the sense of the body in space and the perceived iconographic and conceptual associations they may trigger.’

The Body and The Vessel coincides with Sanpitak’s inclusion in The Milk of Dreams, the international art exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani for the 59^th Venice Biennale, which continues until 27 November. Her paintings of breast stupas and offering bowls in the show are rendered in acrylic, feathers, gold and silver leaf, and silk.

Following The Body and The Vessel, Yavuz Sydney will show a solo presentation by Mehwish Iqbal. —[O]

Main image: Pinaree Sanpitak, Offering Vessel III (2021). Acrylic and paper on canvas. 190 x 230 cm. Courtesy the artist and Yavuz Gallery.