‘Sara Flores’ 
by Charles Darwent  

In 1935, the artists Josef and Anni Albers visited Mexico for the first time. It would not be the last. Mexico, Josef wrote to his friend, Wassily Kandinsky, was ‘a country for art like no other’.  

The couple’s many trips there over the next thirty years would make them connoisseurs of pre-Hispanic culture: the carvings, ceramics and textiles they collected are now divided between museums at Yale. And yet this expertise was, in a sense, a red herring. The Albers saw their collection less as historical or ethnographic than as modern. 

Thus their excitement at it. To the Albers, the modernist values they had taught at the Bauhaus – simplicity of materials, the blurring of art and craft, minimal means put to maximum ends – had been arrived at by pre-Columbian makers millennia before. This was not the cultural borrowing of a Gauguin in Tahiti or Picasso at the Musée d’ethnographie, Paris. For the Albers, the ethnocentric boot was on the other foot.  

That it was often hard to tell whether a clay figurine bought by a roadside at Chichén Itzá had been made a year or a century or a millennium before thrilled the modernist pair. ‘Let us learn from the Mexican artist truthfulness to conception and material, truthfulness to art as spiritual creation,’ Josef wrote.

Sara Flores was born in Peru in 1950, in a small village called Tambo Mayo that has since disappeared. From there, she moved as a child to Paoyan on the Ucayali River, a headstream of what will later become the Amazon. For all its remoteness – it is several hours by boat from Pucallpa, the regional capital where Flores went to live when she was eight – it has not escaped modern life. The river teems with barges carrying the dismembered trunks of trees, the result of logging, much of it illegal, that is threatening the survival of the Amazonian rainforest.

Threatening, too, the Shipibo-Konibo, a local Indigenous People to which Flores belongs. The Shipibo are particularly known for a design system called Kené, although ‘design’ is perhaps too limiting a word. If the linear forms of Kené traced on ceramics, textiles and human skin are its most obvious expression, the word encompasses something more like a cosmology.

The patterns are part of a holistic way of life that takes in shamanistic medicine, healing rituals, the consuming of psychoactive plants and singing of songs. The making of Kené has traditionally been matrifocal and mystical. ‘It was passed down by our grandmothers,’ Flores told an interviewer for Art Basel in 2023. ‘It is the emblem of our culture, it represents the Shipibo worldview, and serves as a visual manifesto.’ It is also central to her own self-definition as an artist.

Yet, like Paoyan, Kené has changed over time. When Flores was young, the textiles on which designs were traced were meant for use as clothing, typically in skirts worn by Shipibo women and girls. Like the Mesoamerican artefacts collected by Josef and Anni Albers, these were not signed. There was no need for them to be. Each design was itself a signature, its authorship instantly recognisable to the Shipibo people who saw it.

Now, Flores works on both handmade and industrial-loom produced cottonseed canvas that is stretched and framed, the frames of finished works being marked with her initials: SFV. The scale of her work has changed as well. Untitled (A Window onto Endlessness) 2 (2025), measures 249.9 centimetres high by 471.4 wide; very much larger than the clothing fabrics she learned to make with her mother.

The question that would once have hung over works such as these was: where does the work sit within a wider artistic canon? In Flores’s own country, the answer was never in doubt. She was 75 before she was given an exhibition at MALI, the Museo de Arte de Lima. The snub wasn’t personal. ‘Folk art is not coming to this museum, ever,’ a curator had fumed twenty years before. Her show, ‘Non Nete’, was the first ever of the work of an Indigenous artist in the museum’s seven-decade history.

Elsewhere, things had already begun to change. Non-Indigenous contemporary art is now regularly shown in ethnographic galleries, Indigenous art in contemporary ones. The change of name of Amsterdam’s main ethnography museum – from Koloniaal (Colonial) to Tropen (Tropical) to Wereld (World) – suggests both a broadening of horizons and a blurring of boundaries.

Flores’s own experience parallels this change. Although she still lives on the Ucayali, she is now represented by White Cube, among the most cutting edge of international contemporary galleries. This year, Sara Flores is the featured artist in the Peruvian Pavilion at that bellwether of contemporaneity, the 61st Venice Biennale.

Fifty years after Josef’s death, the world has finally caught up with the Albers. For them, the either/or question – ethnography or art – was always artificial. So, too, that of history versus contemporaneity. There were underlying values – ‘truthfulness to conception and material, truthfulness to art as spiritual creation’ – that defied place and time. To question whether the anonymous Mexican makers whose work they admired were artisans or artists would simply not have occurred to them.

What might they have made of Sara Flores? Alongside Shipibo creation myths, Flores has one of her own. As a child, she would lie in bed transfixed by the meshwork of the mosquito net hanging above her. On this, she drew in her mind the Kené patterns she would one day make with her mother. Where the Albers’ pre-Hispanic Mexicans had intuited the truth to materials later preached by the Bauhaus, Flores had discovered something very like the modernist grid.

This is of more than coincidental interest. Stand in a gallery of Flores’s paintings and the feel is of modernity, perhaps even of modernism. While the Albers would certainly have praised the ethical underpinnings of her images – the organic pigments made from plants she still harvests and blends herself, her dedication to saving Shipibo culture – they would also have understood the processes that led to them.

With no background in Western painting, Flores has arrived at an art that sits happily alongside it. Her description of her working process might be Anni Albers talking about weaving: ‘First I do a simple drawing. From there, I imagine how I'm going to turn it, where I'm going to do the curves, and from that I get a pattern. Then the pattern expands all over the fabric. I fill it up, evenly, it doesn't change.’¹

Like Albers’ weaving, Flores’s Kené canvases fit into a strain of algoristic modern (and modernist) work that takes in artists such as Bridget Riley and Tess Jaray, both of them fascinated by the generative patterns of traditional Islamic art. For these women, as for Flores, the story is one of control versus randomness – schwindel, as Josef Albers liked to call it, caught out by his own coloured squares.

There is no set template for her drawing. When Flores’s brush sets off across her canvas, she both knows and does not know where it will end up. ‘I have to see how I'm going to do it, what kind of drawing is going to come out,’ she says. The resulting pattern plays tradition off against inspiration, or revelation.

It also generates the other component of her canvases: their colours. These are as diverse as the drawings themselves. The pattern of red lines of Untitled (Pei Maya Kené, 2026) (2026) evolved as vegetal, vine-like: the leaf-shaped forms that tip the end of each line are botanically green. Flores is not bound by nature, though.

The step-and-curve pattern of Studio para la bandera de la Nación Shipibo-Konibo-Xetebo (Maya Punte Kené) 2, 2024 was suggested by the traditional designs of the three peoples of the picture’s title. The canvas’s orange-yellow palette comes only from its geometry, though, and Flores’s imagination. It is abstract painting in the purest sense of the word, and timeless.