Be Takerng Pattanopas Curtin

Be Takerng Pattanopas Curtin’s practice emerges from twin obsessions with space within and space without. His exploration of the human body’s interior, through drawings, installations, paintings, and sculptures, symbolises the infinity of the cosmos. This might be a distinctly 21st-century preoccupation – the zeitgeist of this age as our world seems both smaller and bigger than ever.

 

The artist 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 self.

 

Pattanopa’s completed a Ph.D. (Fine Art) at Cheltenham & Gloucester CHE in the UK. Solo exhibitions 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– Exposure of Tolerance (Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, 2019-2020). He is the Director of the Communication Design Programme (CommDe) at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.