Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach is delighted to present two salon shows by Sinta Tantra, coinciding with the announcement of her major new public artwork as part of the 8111 S. Dixie Development Project. Across two distinct yet interconnecting installations, Tantra considers how different visual languages can offer pathways towards clarity, balance and embodied experience.
The first installation, Akasa, takes its name from a Sanskrit term for sky or space. In Balinese Hinduism it is one of five elements that make up the universe, symbolising openness, emptiness and a connection to the spiritual realm. While Tantra has explored similar themes in previous bodies of work, these latest paintings mark a shift in her colour palette away from darker, saturated tones to pared-back hues that play with the whiteness of the gallery space as well as the filtration of natural light to create a feeling of expansiveness. Here, emptiness is treated not as absence, but as an active condition, charged with potential. Pairing raw linen with dusty pink and her signature use of gold leaf, the paintings capture a dance between light and shadow, yin and yang forces, alongside a sense of tranquility and stillness. Rather than resolving into fixed compositions, these elements suggest a subtle push and pull, a continuous negotiation between presence and void.
The circular canvas in particular acts as a kind of portal or meditation point, its soft edges suggesting an outward, expanding movement while also holding the potential for inward reflection. Across the paintings as well as a series of sculptures, we see a development of her organic forms – alternately reminiscent of plant life, bodies and cosmic matter – which no longer orbit a central motif but instead drift, overlap and interconnect, creating a more fluid and dynamic spatial rhythm. In this way, Akasa becomes an exercise in reduction, using light, material and space to cultivate a heightened awareness of the present.
By contrast the second installation, Bubbles, Blossom and Buttercup, is an explosion of colour. The title comes from the 1990s animated television show The Powerpuff Girls, which featured three young girls with superpowers, each identified by a specific colour: blue, pink and green. These colours form the basis of Tantra’s palette across these works, tapping into a particular kind of femininity or ‘girl power’ that was associated with cuteness and frivolity, but also a feeling of optimism and innocence. Revisiting this pop-culture reference, Tantra reconsiders the potential of these qualities as forms of resilience and strength. While feminist discourse has evolved in recent decades, taking on a more urgent and direct tone, these works propose playfulness and lightness as a counterbalance to the weight of the present moment.
The works in this show repeat the same pattern, using repetition as a stabilising structure through which the shifting colours offer a subtle change in mood. As in Akasa, circular forms recur, but here they hold a different energy which is less meditative than kinetic, suggesting the possibility of movement and transformation.
Across the exhibitions Tantra seeks to create moments of pause and a sense of renewal – not as escapism, but as a conscious act of opening space and quieting the noise to allow for both deeper reflection and a clearer sense of direction.