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ELEMENTAL

H Gallery Bangkok is very pleased to announce sculptor Sopheap Pich’s third solo exhibition with the gallery since 2007. Cambodian-born Pich has established a remarkable international career since first showing in Bangkok and Elemental introduces a maturity in the artist’s practice, an achievement of profound affects and resonances from material substances. The exhibition includes a major new work, titled Monument that builds on Pich’s methods of minimal execution with a variety of processes to acutely relate an epic sense of the elemental.

Found materials, painted and stitched surfaces and organic forms have previously shaped poignant sensibilities and hinted at dark histories. Pich’s practice has developed through an engagement with gridded structures within a layered relationship to art historical formalism and the symbolism of regimentation, concealment and instability. Now Pich heightens a more abstracted quality which is rooted in an all-encompassing view of our environment; from the rudimentary aspects of the built environment, such as the humble brick, to suggestions of growth and both the haptic and visceral experience of the natural world.

Pich explores an essential quality of art across a dexterous engagement with drawing, painting and sculpture: a questioning of the significance of objects and the means by which we engage and understand them within the world at large. For the artist, the experience of time slowly unfolding has become paramount as well the assurance of felt experience on behalf of audiences. A subtle monumentality is revealed through sustained engagement as Pich crafts a broad awareness of being in time, beyond the particulars of history, personal relationships, and icons which try to fix us in place.

Sopheap Pich is based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He studied in the US, achieving a MFA from The School of the Art Institution of Chicago in 1999. Recent exhibitions include For the Love of Things: Still Life (2016), Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York; Drawn from Nature (2015), Asia Society Texas Center, Texas; The Art of Our Time: Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collections (2015), Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Medium at Large (2015), Singapore Art Museum; Cambodian Rattan: The Sculptures of Sopheap Pich (2013), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Documenta 13 (2012). Pich regularly exhibits with Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York and was also included in No Country: Contemporary Art For South and Southeast Asia (2014), Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; Collecting Art of Asia (2012), Smith College Museum of Art, Massachusetts (2012); and Here/Not Here (2011), Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. His works are included in the collections of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; M+, Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong; Singapore Art Museum; Queensland Art Gallery; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle. Pich is regularly reviewed and profiled in major publications and has been the subject of a number of academic theses.

 

New Works by Sopheap Pich
December 1, 2016 – March 31, 2017