Gallery VER Featuring Be Takerng Pattanopas
S.E.A Focus 2024, Singapore
At Tanjong Pagar Distripark
20 January – 28 January 2024
1 PM – 8 PM
At S.E.A. Focus 2024 during Singapore Art Week, Gallery VER (Bangkok) is very pleased to
present Be Takerng Pattanopas’s new series of sculptures alongside excerpts from a celebrated
installation originally commissioned by the Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB) 2022.
Übermensch with Attitude (2022-) – his new series – synthesizes and advances Pattanopas’s longstanding obsession with space, viscera, and the play of light. Compulsively detailed and otherworldly, previous works suggested analogies to both the body and the cosmos. And this underlines the shift from physicality to the intangible as a core teaching of Buddhism. These sculptures, however, take futuristic forms, in which strangely seductive excrescences appear to struggle free from their geometric, steel bases. Organic yet clearly manufactured, microbiological and yet suggesting queer, mutant life forms from a more advanced civilization, the series seeks to imagine a progressive relation between human and nature; a time where bodies, nature, science and the manmade meet. The whole assemblages play with a dichotomy of order and disorder; but they are unexpectedly unified and harmonious.
Immortal? AR and Samsara AR are excerpted from Pattanopas’s ambitious installation Mortalverse at the Great Stupa of Prayoon Temple in Bangkok where the bones of thousands of deceased people are kept. Mortalverse imagines the marriage and deaths of the artist and his life partner, the art critic Brian Curtin. Immortal? AR was prompted by a hot political issue in Thailand, as of 2022, about challenges to local laws that forbid gay marriage. A marble death plaque is augmented by an animation of the couple literally swaggering to their deaths, with a sarcastically-composed tango-ish soundtrack. Samsara AR explores Buddhist cycles of life and death through a copper-gilded sculpture with a central, abysmal, void where the augmented animation depicts the couple after their deaths in successive and countless life-forms, haunted by a chant-like song with profound implications.
Throughout Pattanopas’s decades-long practice, his art gently pushes against the grain of much
contemporary sculpture. An avowal of handmade, labour-intensive processes and embracing of the ‘decorative,’ to an extreme degree, marks him as a rare item.
For media information please contact:
TQPR Thailand
Tom Van Blarcom, tom@tqpr.com
Or
Nuie Titichayapon, nuie@tqpr.com, + 662 260 5820