Myrtille Tibayrenc

Myrtille Tibayrenc (born 1980) is a French painter, curator and gallery director who lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand. She grew up in Bolivia, the United States and France, and has lived in Thailand since 2006.

Her paintings are made in oil on gesso-primed wood, often recycled planks of teak, mango and padauk from northern Thailand, built in thin glazes that leave the grain visible as the skin of the figure. She works in large series, clusters of small paintings that recall the ex-voto walls of churches, each worked like an icon around a single central figure on a bare ground. Her sources are photographs she takes herself or collects, and many of her sitters are friends from the creative community. Recent work draws on Renaissance and Symbolist painting and on mythology, and uses gold leaf to set European painting traditions beside Thai sacred art.

From 2006 she worked as a cultural agent at the Alliance Française in Bangkok. In 2010 she founded Toot Yung Gallery in Bangkok, later the Toot Yung Art Center, which she directed until it closed in 2021, in Bangkok and from 2018 in Chiang Mai. She has painted full time since 2021, and continues to curate occasionally.