Vásquez de la Horra, Sandra

Chile, 1967

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, born in Viña del Mar, Chile, in 1967, grew up in a Catholic family under Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian regime. After studying at the University for Design in Viña del Mar from 1989 to 1994, Vásquez de la Horra moved to Germany, where she enrolled at Düsseldorf Art Academy under Jannis Kounellis and Rosemarie Trockel before attending the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. She currently lives and works in Berlin.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s drawings are influenced by film, fairy tales and botanical and zoological textbooks, as well as from her personal background. Since 1997, the Artist finishes her drawings by dipping them in wax. This process gives her work a unique materiality and emphasises the pencil line with ambiguous depth.

The traditions and myths of her Chilean origins and the influence of Latin-American magic-realist literature are essential in her artistic practice. Religion, mythology, sexuality and the bizarre, reverberate and merge together, trapped beneath the wax coating of her drawings. Her works deal with borderline experiences, femininity, fear and death, as well as poetry, reawakening demons, ghosts, creatures of myth and gloomy dreams.

Her extremely defined images show desires that stem from both her personal and a wider universal experience: they appear ecstatic, traumatic and surrealistic. Frequently working while she travels, her drawings are often stowed in her luggage, functioning as a sort of pictorial diary.

Vásquez de la Horra was awarded in 2023 the prestigious Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2023 of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany; The Guerlain Prize in 2019 and in 2021 received the Hans Theo Ritcher Prize. Her work is part of various public and private collections such as: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Pinakothek der Moderne, München; Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf; Museum of Art, Philadelphia; among others.

The Artist has been invited to the 59th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia 2022 “The Milk of Dreams” curated by Cecilia Alemani. During Frieze 2022, the artwork ‘’Despierta Te Espero’’ realised by the artist has been acquired by the Frieze Tate Fund, supported by Endeavor and is now part of the Tate Collection.