Sandra Cinto: The Path to Stars at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Sandra Cinto, who works in São Paulo, has spent more than three decades building a practice around drawing. Using the line as a gesture, she tests the boundaries between painting, sculpture and site, producing intricate images and immersive environments. The Path to Stars is her twelfth solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, which first showed her work in 1999.

The show brings together new paintings, wall paintings and folding screens. Cinto turns to the sun and the stars as sources of inspiration and as a means of connection at a time marked by polarization and discord. The exhibition is organized as a passage from night to day. At the entrance, a dark blue tondo, Nocturne, evokes the night sky and starts the journey.

Inside the main space, the palette moves through waning twilight to Aurora, a large tondo depicting the first light of sunrise. A series of smaller skyscapes holds the golden light of daytime, and the sequence ends in the inky blue of dusk. Across these works, Cinto looks at how contrasts shape the way we see, feel and interpret the world: light and shadow, presence and absence, balance and imbalance.

Two large biombos, or folding screens, divide the gallery. Each has one side rendered in fine detail in gold and the other covered in loose, gestural brushstrokes on a blue ground. For Cinto, the space between these poles is where possibilities lie. The "middle" in this exhibition is not a point of balance but a field of inquiry, where boundaries become permeable and opposites can coexist, complement one another and transform each other.

Cinto has had solo exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art (2019–2020), Fondation Hermès in Tokyo (2020), Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo (2010) and Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani in Palma, among others. Her public commissions include Open Seascape at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York (2019) and The Wishes Boulevard for the 2021 Thailand Biennial, curated by Yuko Hasegawa. She is currently making eight ceramic-tiled walls for a bookstore in Praça Igarapé, a public square in São Paulo, scheduled to open on December 1, 2026.