The Body and The Gold Breast, 2021

Acrylic and gold leaf on canvas
© Pinaree Sanpitak; courtesy the artist.

In the mid-1990s, after the formidable experience of learning how to breastfeed her son, Pinaree Sanpitak began to create works that emphasize themes of femininity, the bodily, the sacred, and the spiritual. Through images that evoke vessels, breasts, eggs, or delicately rounded profiles, she has compassionately explored how women’s bodies can become powerful and potent symbols, often through abstraction. The Body and the Gold Breast streamlines the breast motif into the simplified form of a gilded mound made with gold leaf, a common material in religious art. The graceful work draws on her personal experience with Buddhist offering bowls and stupa shrines, holy domed structures found in many East and South Asian nations.