Rago Auctions

Thai contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is known for his work that, according to art historian Rochelle Steiner, is “fundamentally about bringing people together.” Born in Buenos Aires in 1961, Tiravanija today lives and works in New York, Berlin, and Chiangmai, Thailand. The son of a Thai diplomat and an oral surgeon, Tiravanija was raised in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada; after studying at Carleton University, he later attended Ontario College of Art in Toronto, the Banff Center School of Fine Arts, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and participated in the Whitney Independent Studies Program.

In the early 1990s, Tiravanija created works that involved preparing foods for gallery attendees, such as the 1990 pad thai at New York’s Paula Allen Gallery, in which Tiravanija cooked pad thai for guests—notably, he chose to use a Westernized recipe for the dish. He would present a similar work in 1995 at the Carnegie Museum of Art, where instructions for making Southeast Asian green curry were written on the wall and the dish was later made and served to visitors. Beyond culinary performance, Tiravanija has also created works that otherwise encourage and explore the act of gathering—for Untitled 1999, for example, students were invited to live in a recreation of the artist’s East village apartment.

Tiravanija received the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum in 2004, and he has been honored with a Gordon Matta Clark Foundation Award, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award, and National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, among other awards. His work has been presented internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Drawing Center, New York; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Serpentine Gallery, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.