The Museo Novecento inaugurates the first solo exhibition in an Italian museum by Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (Viña del Mar, Chile, 1967), curated by Rubina Romanelli . The exhibition, held in the ROOM space , continues the series of exhibitions by women artists begun with Maria Lai and subsequently with the duo Goldschmied & Chiari.
Vásquez de la Horra studied with Jannis Kounellis and Rosemarie Trockel and won important awards such as the Prix de dessin Daniel & Florence Guerlain . The exhibition at the Museo Novecento is a unique opportunity to observe a body of work from recent years . Furthermore, some pieces were created specifically for the occasion, inspired by the works of Mario Sironi in the permanent collection.
Sandra Vásquez de la Horra works with the medium of drawing , which she then immerses in wax, permanently "sealed" by it, giving it a translucent skin and a sense of depth. The powerful images that inhabit her works come from the unconscious , from memory , from transversal intercultural research , from a syncretic vision of religions, and from her almost anthropological approach to the world.
The artist grew up in a conservative Catholic family during Augusto Pinochet's bloody dictatorship (1973-1990). Her drawings often feature women or figures, appearing in an empty space, without a background, in surreal or fantastical positions or situations, risky, sometimes erotic. The broad symbolic vocabulary from which she draws also evokes the complex history of Latin America , often marked by brutal clashes and subjugations that dramatically persist to this day. The drawings, nailed directly to the walls, leave no escape in their nakedness and impose themselves on the viewer, displacing them, forcing a direct and sometimes violent dialogue.
Her style and symbolic vocabulary are highly recognizable. While in the past she worked with small drawings, placing them on walls in compositions and juxtapositions, in her more recent work she has developed large formats that are presented here alongside recent three-dimensional developments in her work: the “ houses ” and the “ leporelli .” These undergo the same treatment as the drawings—first drawn, then cast in wax—and have the characteristic of uniting two mediums that rarely coexist: drawing and sculpture. The first house was conceived starting from the memory of the modernist house in Viña del Mar where the artist lived as a child and which remains a source of great inspiration. The Museo Novecento presents a further development of her work: her first “open” house , created for this exhibition and inspired by Mario Sironi, whose work the artist admired during her first visit to the Museo Novecento. This one, unlike her previous works, is designed internally and resembles a small theater, with a decidedly more varied use of color than her past works. The artist says it is also inspired by her time in Florence and the canons of Renaissance perspective. The leporelli , which consist of accordion-folded sheets of paper, are book-sculptures that vertically announce themselves to the world. Also on display is the small sculpture " Yo soy Casa ," the artist's latest work and the first of a new series never before exhibited.
In “ Lazarus ,” an awakened Lazarus with Asian features walking alongside two dogs evokes the Chinese migratory movement towards Latin America. Similarly, the drawing “ América sin fronteras ” shows a mother earth from which characters freely enter and exit, in a fluidity of borders. “ You are always on my mind ” could refer to the famous 1970s song also performed by Elvis Presley and which speaks of a nostalgic love, or perhaps it refers to the obsession that captures the artist in his research. “ Aguas Profundas ” represents a man falling headlong, a leap of fancy or, perhaps, the unknown destiny towards which each of us is forced to proceed; it could also place us before a fragment of that dark moment in history in which prisoners, later called desaparecidos , were thrown from airplanes still alive. It is certainly Sandra Vásquez de la Horra's desire to go deeper, in search of meaning, in the deep waters .
