Sandra Vásquez de la Horra New Works

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra in the Zeichnungskabinett. As a drawer, the artist born in 1967 in Chile joins motifs from folk religion, superstition and fairytales with memories of the Pinochet dictatorship, which she experienced herself as a child and young woman. There is a symbiotic joining of Latin American traditions with European imagery in the ecstatic, excessive, often ironic and surreal world of the artist. The fine drawings with pencil and crayon on paper broach the issues of dreams and visualization of fears; they also focus on the dramas in human history as caused by religion, love, hate, melancholy, war and death.

What is striking is the dominance of female figures that usually radiate a kind of crass sexuality and can also be interpreted as objects of lust and desire in Vásquez de la Horra's works. The rarely appearing male players on the other hand are allocated roles such as clowns, soldiers, hanged men or young boys. Noticeable in all the drawings is the lack of perspective space, which shifts the figures to a kind of limbo. Only a fixed, almost voyeuristic look by the viewer brings the events back to our world. Another significant element in the oeuvre of Sandra Vásquez de la Horra is the written word, which the artist freely distributes on the folios. The frequent mixing of German, English and Spanish expressions lends the work a Dadaism flavour and does not serve to explain but rather to reinforce the mysteriousness of the scenes. In a last technical step, the drawings are given their characteristic form in which they are immersed in a bath of melted beeswax and a yellowish-brown film remains. With this procedure, the drawings have an effect that is transparent and strangely timeless - an aesthetic that further intensifies the surreal content of the images and the depth of sharpness of the lines.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra was born in 1967 in Viña del Mar, not far from the Chilean city of Valparaíso. She was 6 years old when the dictator Augusto Pinochet came to power, who then ruled for 17 years as a dictator. Already as a 12-year-old she successfully applied for a study spot at Akademie der Schönen Künste. During her studies in visual communication between 1989 and 1994 at the University of Graphic Design in her hometown of Viña del Mar, she joined the artist and student association of Chile Crea, which is dedicated to democracy. Sandra Vásquez de la Horra continued her studies at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where she studied graphic arts from 1995 to 2001 with Jannis Kounellis and then with Rosemarie Trockel, and increasingly developed her own unmistakable style. In 2003, the artist completed a postgraduate program at Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne. Since then, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra has lived and worked in Düsseldorf.

In addition to numerous important exhibitions in museums like the Bonefanten Museum in Maastricht and Kunsthaus Fridericianum in Kassel, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra's works are found in large museums and private collections such as Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Piermont Morgan Library in New York and Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf.