Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Archetypal Self

"Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Archetypal Self" at the Gutshaus Steglitz, curated by Brigitte Hausmann, is the artist's first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin. Berlin-based artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (born in Viña del Mar, Chile, in 1967) primarily creates drawings (pencil and graphite), as well as mixed-media, works on paper (watercolor and gouache), which she then dips in wax, resulting in a semi-transparent effect and a relief-like impression. Recently, she has been moving into the third dimension with accordion-folded or house-like objects produced in the same media. The exhibition presents around forty works from the last twenty years.
Her work is influenced by her native Chile, with its political, cultural, and social history and its landscape; from literature, especially Chilean authors like Pablo Neruda and Roberto Bolaño; from art and art history, including popular culture's comics and cartoons; from the religious and spiritual (ranging from Christianity to indigenous cosmological visions); from dreams, fairy tales, myths. These are by no means "just" private mythologies and visions: behind them stand collective ideas and memories of things like the political and societal violence of the 20th and 21st centuries, particularly under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Personal experiences become interwoven with collective memories, and her visions with cultural memory.
An exhibition catalog featuring texts by Raphael Fonseca, Jenny Graser, and Friedhelm Mennekes will be published by Distanz Verlag.