Tally Beck Contemporary is very pleased to announce a solo exhibition of works on paper by the Thai sculptor Be Takerng Pattanopas, who lives and works in Bangkok. This is Pattanopas’s first solo exhibition in New York City and follows his recent success at the SCOPE Art Show in New York. The show will run from May 14 to June 12, 2011 with an opening reception on Saturday, May 14 from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. in the gallery at 42 Rivington St.

Pattanopas’s practice explores dynamic relationships between the illusive and the literal in terms of references to the human body. His sculptural work initially emerged from a study of the use of light in Southeast Asian religious statuary and has recently employed delicate constructions of viscera. Themes of corporeal impermanence and transcendence, derived from Buddhist thought, underline Pattanopas’s art.

Compulsive Orders is a selection of drawings from a series humorously dubbed Pubism or Pubist that the artist has been working on for over two years. Most immediately they appear as a close observation of the soft movements of body hair and/or microbiological elements but, on contemplation, begin to suggest something altogether more epic: vortexes of material and immaterial energy that belie the intimate scale of the works. At the heart of Pattanopas’s practice is the sense of a world that is at once sensational and ethereal, reminding us of the bodies we occupy and the fragile terms of our existence.

Be Takerng Pattanopas was born in the Southern Thai province of Trang in 1965 and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Architecture of Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University and deputy director of the international program in Communication Design. He exhibits internationally.