Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s Surreal, Symbolic Drawings Are Finally in the Spotlight

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra is always drawing. “I have tables everywhere,” the artist said in her sunny Berlin studio, which, true to her words, is filled with huge drawing tables. “It’s like a diary,” she said, referring to her constant scribbling. Her works on paper are scattered across the space: hanging on walls, or laid out in unfolded versions of the accordion-style leporello format she favors. Yet another table holds a wax bath that the artist uses to coat many of her works in thin, skin-like layers.

The Chilean artist has been working prolifically like this for decades—producing drawings in mostly pencil, gouache, and watercolor that combine biological motifs with themes drawn from marginalized spiritual traditions, without much notice from the international art world. Today, she’s finally reaping the benefits of her hard work. Last year, she was awarded the Käthe Kollwitz Prize by Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, a sign of recognition from the city she’s called home since 1995. The award includes a show at the Akademie, opening later this year. “I’ve put the seeds in for a long time…taking care of the ‘plants,’ and things happened,” said the artist of her late bloom.

The current wave of interest in Vásquez de la Horra’s work—which has also yielded a solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich, opening later this year; and her first institutional exhibition in the U.S., on view at the Denver Art Museum through July 21st—can be traced back to 2022. That year, Cecilia Alemani included the artist in the main exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams.” Vásquez de la Horra showed a selection of her surreal works on paper—some built into boxy sculptural house shapes, others folded into leporellos. It was a milestone for the artist: She felt the amount of space she was given by Alemani was a sign of the curator’s trust in her work.

This was where Raphael Fonseca, the curator of the Denver show, first discovered her practice. “[She] is a rare case of an artist that dedicated her entire career to diving into one media—drawing—and deepening her experimentation with it,” Fonseca said in an interview with Artsy. “In a historical present where our discussion on pleasure, spirituality, motherhood, ecology, and the idea of diaspora are very latent, her exhibition and research really provoke new discussions about it.”

Indeed, the themes of Vásquez de la Horra’s presentation at the Biennale were true to the ideas that have influenced her entire practice: dreams, bodies, and our intertwinement in the natural world. Inside a wooden structure built to house her work, female faces appeared in ecstatic communion with the Earth. Other figures were shown in silhouette, or even cross section, occasionally melting and merging with the landscape around them. Women, in Vazquez de la Horra’s world, are sometimes strong leaders, other times conduits to the spiritual, communing with the Earth.

The artist’s early years in Chile had a large impact on her work. Vásquez de la Horra grew up under the 17-year-long rule of Augusto Pinochet, a time during which she remembers seeing tearful protests on her way home from school. “I grew up in this. For me, it’s impossible to ignore it,” she said, though she alludes to this spirit of resistance sparingly, rather than making it an explicit focus of her practice. No pasarán los venceremos mi amor (2020), for example, obliquely references political defiance in its title (“They won’t pass we’ll defeat them my love” in English), which appears spread across the outline of a petticoated woman.

In 1995, she moved to Germany, studying with Greek Arte Povera legend Jannis Kounellis and conceptual pioneer Rosemarie Trockel in Düsseldorf, before moving to Berlin. It was also during this period that she began exploring Santería, a religious tradition with roots in Cuba and the Yoruban nations of West Africa, into which she was initiated by a priestess. With its emphasis on nature-oriented rituals and the overlap between the worlds of the living and dead, it now forms a huge part of the way she sees the world. “There is before Santería, and after Santería,” Vásquez de la Horra said of her art practice. Saludos a Olorum (“Greetings to Olorum”) (2019), a typical “after Santería” work, references the Yoruba god of the skies, and shows a nude female silhouette saluting the sun.

Religion has helped Vásquez de la Horra explore connections to her forebears, some of whom descended from the Aymara group, indigenous to the region between present-day Peru and Bolivia. Recently, efforts to remedy the historical exclusion of artists working with ideas from Indigenous cultures have been gaining traction in the art world. For artists like Vásquez de la Horra, it’s a fertile moment that builds on decades of research and understanding. “I feel like now we have the opportunity to have the dialogue. We’re awakening,” she said, nodding to the symbolism of “The Awake Volcanoes,” the title of her current exhibition in Denver.