Sara Flores was a child when she learned the ancient art of kené—the sacred visual language of the Shipibo-Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon, in which geometric patterns are seen as manifestations of the connections between humans, plants, and spirits. The form is traditionally passed down from mothers to daughters, though not by rote instruction. Flores absorbed the method in Tambo Mayo, a village along the Ucayali River in northeastern Peru where she was born in 1950. The village has since been abandoned, but she still lives and works in the region today, using an ink pen that she fashioned from a broken umbrella rod and pigments extracted from plants that grow along the Ucayali.

Over a dozen paintings in the kené manner make up a new exhibition of her work, “Akinananti,” which translates from the Shipibo-Conibo language roughly as “interconnectedness.” According to Flores, kené art was not originally intended to be sold. It was made for young Shipibo-Conibo women’s coming-of-age ceremonies, in which bodies, clothes, textiles, and ceramics are all covered with painted patterns. Her own method is to paint directly onto wild-cotton canvases, without any preliminary drawings. She works outward from the center of each canvas, and she never repeats a pattern; to do so, she says, would be to sacrifice the ever-changing essence of kené.

Flores’s largest painting to date, Untitled (A Window onto Endlessness) 2 (2025), took four months to complete. (Its companion, Untitled (A Window onto Endlessness) 1, is on view at this year’s Venice Biennale, where Flores is the first Indigenous artist to represent Peru; both titles evoke the portal-like power of kené.) From a distance, it appears to be a unified lattice of black lines, but a closer examination reveals striking variations in rhythms and motifs, like crosses and lozenges, as well as accents of color punctuating the negative space. The patterns seem to animate the monumentally large canvas—it is over eight by fifteen feet—calling to mind the vibrating planes familiar from op art, as well as artists who have explored the spiritual dimensions of the grid, from Agnes Martin to Sol LeWitt.

Kené artists traditionally used the ayahuasca root as a source of their pigment. People who consume it as a drug with a shaman often describe passing through visual portals. Flores’s work is not a direct depiction of such visions; it aims to evoke their nonrational aspect. The relationships that she channels resist language in favor of a more intuitive understanding.

Flores had been selling her work in Peru for decades when she met Matteo Norzi, an artist and filmmaker who later became her dealer. In 2011, when Norzi traveled there to participate in an ayahuasca ceremony, he encountered paintings in small shops in Lima and Pucallpa that were signed simply “SFV.” When I spoke to Norzi earlier this summer, he recalled how they had an energy and a precision unlike anything he had seen before. He spent months trying to track down the artist. When they eventually met, Flores agreed to sell her work to him for a small sum. He offered her much more, promising that he could introduce her work to a wider market. Several years later she finally had a breakthrough outside Peru. After a presentation at the Outsider Art Fair in New York in 2020, during the pandemic, White Cube exhibited her work online, and in-person shows soon followed. Her exhibition at the Museo de Arte de Lima in 2025 marked the first solo show of a contemporary Indigenous artist in the institution’s sixty-five-year history.

In 2023, on the site of a former ayahuasca retreat along the Ucayali River in the Shipibo-Conibo territory, Flores founded the Bakish Mai Multiversity, a school dedicated to teaching, among other things, kené painting, the Shipibo-Conibo language, medicinal plant practices, and ecological stewardship. She gives some of the proceeds from the sale of her work to her two daughters, who teach the art of kené at the school to younger Shipibo-Conibo women, and to environmental causes in the Peruvian Amazon, where the materials used for centuries to make kené are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Unlike the work of many artists with representation in blue-chip galleries, Flores’s spurs reinvestment in art, as well as in the materials, labor, and environment required to make it. Her lines flow back into the region from which they first emerged.