Over the last four decades, Pinaree Sanpitak 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. Characterised by sensitivity and ethereality, Sanpitak’s paintings and drawings are tethered to a captivation with her own body, and potent concepts of the sacred and the spiritual that the body contains. In the mid-1990s, inspired by the powerful experience of breastfeeding her own child, Sanpitak began producing many images of the breast. In the new series on view here, which includes textured paintings that incorporate acrylic, feathers, gold and silver leaf, and silk, she reduces the breast motif into the form of the mound and the vessel, correlating personal experience with forms that recall Buddhist offering bowls or stupa shrines, a sacred domed structure found in many East and South Asian nations. Sanpitak’s Offering Vessels series of the early 2000s registers the vessel as a container of perception and experience or as a repository of emptiness. More than simply an expression of the physical figure, the bowls seen in pieces such as Offering Vessels #8 (2001–2002) and Offering Vessels #16 (2002) speak to the body’s wide-ranging potential across the sacred and profane.
Madeline Weisburg
