With drawing as the foundation of her artistic practice, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s multidisciplinary work depicts the interconnectedness of the human body and the natural world. Taking inspiration from spiritual mythologies, folklore, religious iconographies, and Latin American popular imagery, she explores themes of the body, landscape, motherhood, gender, sexuality, and migration. Often dipping her works in beeswax or creating accordion-like paper sculptures, Vásquez de la Horra transforms them into three-dimensional objects, challenging the limits and possibilities of drawing.
Born in Chile, Vásquez de la Horra lived through Augusto Pinochet’s repressive military regime, prompting her to emigrate in the 1990s to study art in Germany, where she lives and works today. Her work transgresses the taboos of her conservative upbringing, often through surreal, erotic, or maternal female forms, creating a fantastical visual language that is seeped in myth and mystery. Perceiving the body as a geography, her figures contain hybrid plant, animal, human, and terrestrial features, emphasizing our physical connection to the environment around us.
Tanya Bonakdar