Udomsak Krisanamis

A mindful mission

May 27th — July 31st, 2011
Kunstverein Freiburg - Freiburg — Germany

The exhibition featured a new series of works. Ten large-format paintings (100 x 152 cm each), twelve small-format paintings (25 x 30 cm each), fifteen collages/drawings, a series of one hundred wooden sculptures and a presentation entitled Country Club Shop. The artist also produced two wall drawings.

Krisanamis' work has always been energised by its contradictions. His obsessive, labour-intensive painting process develops a vocabulary that resists the easy articulacy of postmodern culture, and yet he often mixes that language with familiar pop cultural signs that dramatise the polarities between Eastern Asia and Western America, wealthy capitalism and poverty, local spiritualism and globalist secularism. A painterly language which depends on the gradual accretion of mute gestures is combined with found image seized instantaneously off the internet. Krisanamis embodies these contradictions in his personal life, dividing his time between Chiang Mai and New York.

If Krisanamis' new paintings – densely layered with web-like skeins of acrylic paint – suggest artisanal labour, his new series of sculptures, in the form of enlarged golf tees, evoke the recreational activities of the wealthy leisure classes of the West. Upended, so they resemble mini rockets, they are also symbols of aggressive capitalism. The found photograph showing the entrance of a Golf Club in wartorn Kabul, in which an armed soldier stands guard, blends these themes into a sinister comedy.

A series of wall drawings quote provocative, newsy slogans in block capitals – “Global Investments” and “Tuscany-Style Condominium” – in the style of the headlines that are collaged onto the drawings Krisanamis has made of sheets on packing cardboard. Seen in the context of the self-possession of his paintings, it is as though these loud proclamations were being shouted out in a language the speaker does not himself understand. The collages feature cut-out headlines surrounded by Abstract- Expressionism drips and splashes of paint. The gesturalism is characterised as melodrama and rhetoric by its proximity to the self-dramatising headlines.

The paintings, sculptures, collages and text-based wall paintings will be complemented by a new selection of the Quicktime films. These are short loops, shot on a consumer camcorder, or even a mobile phone. Filmed in New York and Thailand, their elliptical brevity contrasts with the slow time of Krisanamis’ paintings. They are playful and light, observant of the mysteries of everyday transience.

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Udomsak Krisanamis

All is prettier

June 22nd — November 19th, 2023
100 Tonson Foundation - Bangkok — Thailand


Udomsak Krisanamis

Somewhere Only I Know

October 7th — December 24th, 2022
Centre Silpakorn University - Bangkok — Thailand