Gallery VER

Be Takerng Pattanopas almost died a few times, since he has suffered complex health issues with benign tumours in adrenal and pituitary glands. This is addressed through hybrid forms that play with symbolizations of voids, microscopic invasions of the body, and also tunnels and monoliths. The latter motif was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s famed film 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on the sci-fi novel by Arthur C. Clarke. All the elements are precisely orchestrated by the artist so that the viewer’s experience is strangely ambiguous, or meanings appear perpetually in flux as they contemplate expansive metaphors of the self.

In short, Pattanopas’s practice emerges from twin obsessions with space within and space without. His drawings, installations, paintings and sculptures explore the human body’s interior as such can be symbolized to suggest the infinity of the cosmos. This might be considered a distinctly 21st century preoccupation; the spirit of our time (Zeitgeist) as our world seems both smaller and bigger than ever.

After completing his Ph.D. (Fine Art) from Cheltenham & Gloucester CHE, UK, Pattanopas has had several solo exhibitions. These include Space of 25 Light Years (JWD Art Space, Bangkok, 2021); The Nerve That Eats Itself (Gallery VER, Bangkok, 2018); What I Don’t Know That I Know (H Gallery, Bangkok, 2013); Compulsive Orders (Tally Beck Contemporary, New York City, 2011); and Permanent Flux (GMT+7, Brussels, 2009). Commissions and group exhibitions include GAP the Mind (2012), i Light Marina Bay (Singapore); and SPECTROSYNTHESIS II (Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 2019-2020). Rokayasala: House of Dis-ease and the second installation titled Mortalverse AR (Bangkok Art Biennale 2022). Within/Without #3 in Kinan Art Week (Aura Contemporary Art Foundation, Japan, 2022) He is currently Programme Director of Communication Design (CommDe) at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.