Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

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.

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Sandra Vásquez de la Horra was born in Viña del Mar, Chile in 1967 and currently lives and works in Berlin. She studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf before attending the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne. Vásquez de la Horra has had recent solo exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Münich (2025-2026); Denver Art Museum (2024; traveled to Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires MALBA; and Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles); Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2024); Sächsische Akademie der Künste, Dresden (2021); and Museo Novecento, Florence (2019); and group exhibitions at the 59th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2022) and the Drawing Biennial, London (2019), among others. Her work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London; Pinakothek der Moderne, Münich; Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf; and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is the recipient of the Käthe Kollwitz Prize (2023); the Hans Theo Richter Prize (2021); and The Guerlain Prize (2019).