Sandra Vásquez de la Horra grew up during Pinochet’s seventeen-year military regime, leaving Chile to study in Germany in the 1990s. She often seals her drawings with molten beeswax, a process that evokes a religious connotation and adds a layer of vulnerability to their materiality. Symbols deriving from Indigenous and marginalised cultures appear as emblems in the drawings, for example, Santa Muerte, the dressed-up skull in Der Tod und das Mädchen (2015). The female figure is often depicted as creator and Mother Earth but also as violated or submissive. Displayed here inside a house-like wooden structure designed by the artist, Vásquez de la Horra’s works show female bodies melding with surrealistic landscapes (as in Erupciones [2019] and Flotante y su genealogía [2020]), dissolving into light (Saludo a Olorun, 2021), or becoming carriers or companions to texts (América sin Fronteras [2017] and La Voz de un Pueblo que lucha [2019]). In a new series of graphite, watercolour, and wax-on-paper works, she employs accordion folds to bring her figures into sculptural space. Her practice explores themes of mortality, rebirth, sexuality, myth, and ritual as well as examining the violence and subjugation experienced by people of African descent throughout Latin American history.
Liv Cuniberti
