NEW YORK, NY.- Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, announced its representation of Thailand-based artist Pinaree Sanpitak. The gallery will present a solo exhibition by Sanpitak in fall 2024, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2018. Galerie Lelong & Co. will present work by Sanpitak for the first time at Art Basel, Switzerland.

For over three decades, Pinaree Sanpitak has explored her sense of being in the world, emanating from and in dialogue with her own body and experiences. Deploying a concise vocabulary of signifiers in a sensual, minimal style, Sanpitak reduces her artistic language to its essence to create a joyful experience of feeling and sensing, widening and engaging the body in its many dimensions: individual, social, spiritual, aesthetic.

Born in Thailand, Sanpitak won a scholarship to the School of Fine Art and Design at the University of Tsukuba in Japan where she earned her B.A. in 1986. On her return to Thailand, she became part of the first wave of contemporary Thai artists who combined material experimentation with conceptual concerns. After the birth of her son in 1993, motherhood became a central focus of her work.

Representations of the breast epitomized that experience, and other forms have since found their way into her lexicon to address themes of womanhood, nurture, spirituality, and more broadly, the experience of being human in the world.

Employing a wide range of materials, Sanpitak pushes the boundaries between material and meaning by exploiting the slippages between concepts such as strength and fragility, lightness and weight, hard and soft. Intent on making art that encourages one not only to see but also sense with the body, Sanpitak has made installations and interactive works that invite visitors to commune and complete the work.

Mary Sabbatino, Vice President/Partner at Galerie Lelong & Co., says, “I’m delighted to welcome Pinaree Sanpitak to the gallery. Her unique use of material and her insistence on the importance of the female body as transmission of life and power is of critical significance.”

One of Asia’s most important contemporary artists, Pinaree Sanpitak’s works have been exhibited in numerous museums and biennales, including the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale entitled The Milk of Dreams curated by Cecilia Alemani in 2022. Other exhibitions and public projects have taken place at the Bangkok Art Biennale (2023), Hancock Shaker Village Museum (2022), the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place, (2017), Toledo Museum of Art (2015), and the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (2014).

Sanpitak’s work is in the collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, California; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; M+, Hong Kong; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Singapore Art Museum; MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai, Thailand; the Seattle Art Museum, Washington; and the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; among many others. In 2007, Sanpitak won the Silpathorn Award that honors distinguished contemporary artists in Thailand.

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York represents Pinaree Sanpitak in collaboration with Ames Yavuz. Sanpitak lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand, where she was born in 1961.