Impossible Mind: Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

Demons, ghosts, creatures of myth and gloomy dreams reawaken in the diminutive drawings of Sandra Vásquez de la Horra. Born in Viña del Mar in Chile in 1967, the artist will exhibit her visionary, wax coated works at Sprovieri Progetti for her first solo show in the UK.

 

Having studied in Düsseldorf under Rosemarie Trockel and Jannis Kounellis, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s drawings are informed by film, fairy tales and botanical and zoological textbooks. The extremely precise images show instances that stem from both her personal and a wider universal experience: they appear ecstatic, traumatic and surrealistic.

 

Visual memory of experiences of the military dictatorship of Pinochet (with which she grew up) is steeped with influence from Latin-American magic-realist literature: religion, mythology, sexuality and the bizarre reverberate and merge, trapped beneath the wax coating of her drawings. Frequently working while she travels, the small sized drawings are stowed in the artist’s luggage, functioning as a sort of pictorial diary. Emerging for exhibition she arranges them in highly particular clusters that seem to function as a map in a surge of deeply symbolic, single motifs.

The small size of the torture victims, mythical creatures, and religiously and libidinously motivated figures does not strive to overwhelm the viewer with obscenity or effect. Body, line and form have become a means to introspective exploration: working together with symbols from history, religion and culture, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s works dock themselves within a collective understanding and, as stated by Jean Christophe Ammann in the catalogue accompanying this travelling exhibition, “inkling becomes present”.