Tales of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Natee Utarit (1970) was born in Thailand and is one of the leading figures in contemporary Thai painting. Natee graduated from Silpakorn University in 1992, majoring in painting, sculpture and graphic art. He has exhibited extensively since the late 1980s and has participated in numerous group exhibitions. Initially influenced by German Expressionism, his oeuvre has gone on to question the conventions of painting. 'Tales of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow' employs a similar compositional framework to Diego Velazquez's 1656 painting, 'Las Meninas' which is a complex arrangement of twelve characters in an unusual aristocratic setting. Here, Natee adopted the setting of the Las Meninas's 12 characters with a twist, by replacing the former characters with toys, a set of dwarves, a rabbit and a pink toy soldier. A cheeky artistic pun on the original work, 'Tales of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow' is also a conceptual work which alludes to both the history of the 17th century Spanish court and the Thai kingdom of today.