Sinta Tantra

Sinta Tantra
1947, 2017

When invited to paint The Cube building, Sinta Tantra aimed ‘to make the building fizz’ by transforming the surfaces of its rather immobile and stolid volume. Whilst the colours in her hard-edge paintings usually resonate with those of her Balinese family cultural background, here she uses candy pink, racing green and Wedgewood blue – all colours that she found in a poster from 1947 advertising holiday travel by rail to Folkestone. The work of Sonia Delaunay was the inspiration for the circle with flowing and broken lines of colour. This eclectic mixture of references suits Tontine Street, a neighbourhood in which migrants from many parts of the world have made their home.

Tantra’s bold interventions use colour abstractions that wrap themselves around architectural environments, transforming them in the process. The works are a hybrid of pop and formalism, a bricolage of colour and rhythm, an exploration of identity and aesthetics. Her themes include the slippage between pictorial and physical space, turning something ‘inside out’, and how we as bodies become submerged in surface and structure.

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