Galerie Lelong: Dialogues: Pinaree Sanpitak with Cecilia Alemani

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. After the birth of her son, Sanpitak centered representations of the breast in her practice to epitomize the beauty she found in the experience, while 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.

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.

Cecilia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York City. Since 2011, she has been the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Director & Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program presented by the High Line in New York City. She is also the curator of the upcoming 12th SITE Santa Fe International, scheduled to open in June 2025. From 2020 to 2022, she served as artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale, where she curated the acclaimed exhibition The Milk of Dreams, which was visited by over 800,000 visitors.

In September 2023, she curated the exhibition Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self, the first American retrospective of Japanese painter Tetsuya Ishida (1973–2005), at Gagosian Gallery in New York. In November 2023, Alemani organized Making Their Mark, the first public presentation in New York of the Shah Garg Collection, a major exhibition showcasing the works of more than 80 of the most significant women artists from the last eight decades. In January 2024, she served as the curator of Anu Põder: Space for My Body, the first solo exhibition presented outside Estonia of works by Anu Põder at Muzeum Susch. She also served as artistic director of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires in 2018 and was the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Over the past twenty years, Alemani has developed an expertise in commissioning and producing ambitious artworks for the public space and unusual sites.