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PINAREE Sanpitak
About the Artist
Pinaree Sanpitak (b. 1961, Thailand) is one of Asia’s most important contemporary artists. In the 1990s, her ground-breaking exhibition Breast Works marked the start of the artist’s reference to an emergent and defining iconography: the women’s breast, which Sanpitak has become renowned for. Over the last four decades,
she has developed an enigmatic inventory of symbols distilling women’s bodies to their most elemental parts, expressed variously through vessels, breasts, eggs, and subtly curved profiles. Conflated with imagery of the offering bowl or a Buddhist stupa (shrine), Sanpitak has created a complex lexicon that weaves seamlessly between the sacred and the profane. Characterised by tenderness and ethereality, Sanpitak’s works are tethered to a captivation with her own body and womanhood.
Her sensorial inquiries also reveal a keen sensitivity towards a range of materials, and she has produced an expansive and compelling body of work across diverse media and techniques including painting, collage, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance. Underpinning Sanpitak’s practice is an abiding fascination with the potentiality of the body, her own body as sensate space, her lived experience of the bodily as a woman and, more recently, the charged and often convivial space between and among bodies that her participatory works create.
Sanpitak’s works are included in the collections of over 30 institutions, including: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (USA), The Phillips Collection (USA), Asian Art Museum San Francisco (USA), Chrysler Museum (USA), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (USA), Nasher Museum of Art (USA), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (Japan), Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (Japan), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Japan), Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (Australia), Art Gallery of South Australia, Arter–Vehbi Koç Foundation (Turkey), National Gallery Singapore, Museum MACAN (Indonesia) and M+ (Hong Kong).
Pinaree Sanpitak. Courtesy the artist
WORKS IN THE COLLECTION
Pinaree Sanpitak, "Clouds and Eggs", 2025
Pencil on canvas, 145 x 160 cm
Courtesy the artist and Ames Yavuz
Cloud and Eggs (2025) holds a particularly special place within Pinaree’s oeuvre. It marks the artist’s introduction of a blush-toned palette into her painting practice—a sensitive departure that brings a new emotional register to her established visual language. The work carries a quiet tenderness, and deepens her long-standing exploration of the female body through abstraction. Drawing from the Pali-Sanskrit word payotara, simultaneously meaning ‘beholder of milk’ and ‘beholder of water’, Sanpitak draws a parallel between the body as a vessel—unpredictable, sensual and sustaining—and the transformative capabilities of a cloud.
Especially since 2000, the artist has thought of the body as a generative vessel, holding, receiving and radiating. The experience of giving birth to her son in 1993 brought a new awareness of the potentiality and enigma of the female body, and led to the discovery of the breast as a motif, which has since become a site of constant return. Not simply a stand-in for a woman’s body, the breast form is a portal for the artist, opening up broader investigations into the sensate, corporeal and spiritual. It is thus also a point of departure, the breast meeting with other form-concepts such as that of the Buddhist stupa (or memorial) leading to what Sanpitak calls the ‘Breast Stupa’, a form bringing the sacred into confluence with the sensuous.
Poetic works as Cloud and Eggs extend from the fullness of Sanpitak's lived and felt experience as an artist, woman and mother.