Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (born 1967 in Viña del Mar) combines transnational and Indigenous perspectives in her multidisciplinary artistic approach. Her oeuvre comprises drawing and painting as well as video and performance, and reflects complex events, stories, rituals, and beliefs rooted in her upbringing in Chile as well as in her many years of living in Germany.
Vásquez de la Horra made her first series of works during the Pinochet regime, from the mid-1980s to the 1990s, focusing on the body and its worldly embedding through signs, fragments, and language. She creates drawings of fabulous hybrid creatures with human, animal, and plant features, revealing the incompatibility of history and morality. These works, soaked in beeswax, a technique she has been using since 1997, are woven into experimental hangings to create multi-perspectival stories and spatial installations. In parallel, she created video performances during her early years in Europe, where she processed not only biographical events but also historically significant ones, around themes such as loneliness, separation, and racism.