Biography:

Hathairat Maneerat is a Bangkok born, New York City based contemporary artist and former fashion designer. Her background in fashion design and formal training in painting have shaped a distinctive visual language, where confident line, structural form, and sculptural techniques merge seamlessly with contemporary figurative painting. Working primarily on wood panels, Hathairat builds richly textured surfaces using modeling paste, sand, and oil paint, creating sculptural relief that dissolves the boundary between painting and sculpture. Light, texture, and material become active elements within each composition, producing shifting visual experiences that evolve with the viewer’s perspective. The tactile quality of her work evokes an almost irresistible desire to experience the surface physically, while its durable construction reinforces themes of resilience, permanence, and transformation.

Describing her practice as Neo Psychological Surrealism, Hathairat explores the unseen architecture of the human mind through symbolic portraiture, layered surfaces, and immersive visual space. Her paintings merge contemporary figuration with surreal elements to examine memory, identity, resilience, and personal transformation. Recurring upward facing figures become symbols of hope, quiet strength, and the courage to rise beyond adversity, while organic forms and sculptural textures extend the emotional narrative beyond the limits of the traditional two-dimensional picture plane.

Drawing inspiration from both classical craftsmanship and contemporary expression, Hathairat creates works that exist between painting and sculpture, where materiality becomes inseparable from psychological storytelling. Each painting is conceived not simply as an image, but as an immersive experience that invites prolonged observation, revealing new relationships between texture, symbolism, perception, and emotion with every encounter

EDUCATION

• New York Academy of Art, New York, NY

         Certificate of Fine Arts, 2024

• Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)

         Advanced Certificate in Painting (Expected 2027)

• Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Bangkok, Thailand, 2008
• ESMOD Paris, Paris, France

         Fashion Design, 2004

Exhibitions & Art Fairs:

2025

• Art on Paper, New York, NY
• One Art Space, New York, NY

2024

• Spectrum Miami, Miami, FL
• Agora Gallery, New York, NY

2023

• Deck the Walls, New York Academy of Art, New York, NY
• Red Dot Miami, Miami, FL
• Galleria La Pigna, Rome, Italy

Statement:

Hathairat Maneerat’s work exists where emotion becomes architecture, where psychology, beauty, and chaos collide. Rooted in her self-defined movement, Neo Psychological Surrealism, her paintings transform invisible patterns of thought into physical landscapes. Layer by layer, she constructs tension between control and eruption, serenity and storm, using sculptural surfaces that fuse fragility with strength. Her figures often emerge from fluid optical fields and luminous distortions, symbolizing the complexity of inner life. Each surface carries traces of time, memory, and resilience, evoking a state of consciousness suspended between reality and dream.

Hathairat’s practice questions what it means to be seen, to endure, and to reclaim power through beauty, where calm is never passive, and silence holds voltage.