Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Awake Volcanoes: Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires Malba, Argentina

The first solo exhibition in Argentina by Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, renowned for her recent participation in the Venice Biennale and for receiving the prestigious Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2023. The exhibition comprises paintings, drawings, and prints by this artist based in Berlin, Germany. In her work, Vásquez de la Horra explores the concepts of fantasy, desire, fear, and pleasure to delve into the relationships between the human body and the world around it. Drawing, which she conceives as a flexible and dynamic medium, is a fundamental aspect of her practice.

Vásquez de la Horra was born in 1967 in Viña del Mar, Chile, where she grew up during Augusto Pinochet's seventeen-year dictatorship. She left her country in the 1990s to study in Germany. Her drawings often incorporate symbols from diverse cultures, and her female figures play contrasting roles in narratives that explore freedom, spirituality, and nature. Her works depict female bodies merging with surreal landscapes in a poetic experimentation that intertwines the absurd with affirmations of affection and pleasure.

“Silhouettes of human bodies, mountains, volcanoes, and words dot the work of Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, who delves into shared and never-before-revealed stories of trauma, desire, fantasies, and taboos,” says Fonseca. “The artist was born in Chile and has lived for several decades in Germany, where she has created her own artistic language, steeped in Latin American history and European artistic traditions. With a career spanning almost forty years, she works daily and continues to surprise those who have followed her for decades, as well as those who are just discovering her practice.”

The exhibition is divided into four sections : A Fire Burns Within , which explores the relationship between the body and the landscape; Botany of Evolution , which examines the cycles of life in detail; Thoughts , which questions how images dialogue with writing; and Deep Waters , which offers a coexistence between human beings, spirituality, and our environment.

The Awakened Volcanoes presents pieces created over four decades of his career, in which Vásquez de la Horra explores mythologies, fantastic and hybrid plants, diverse geographies and texts written in Spanish, English, Italian, Latin and German, which expand the semantic possibilities of each work.

Photo by  © Santiago Ortí / Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires Malba