Sandra Vásquez de la Horra | Graphic Works

BORCHs Butik is looking forwards to presenting graphic works by Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra is first and foremost a draughtswoman. Although she has produced a number of sculptural works, it is the short distance between thought and paper that has turned out to be the medium best suited to her desire to render visible a strangely familiar yet at the same time uncanny universe.

Her drawings, all of them in moderate scale, are not beautiful in the classical sense of the word, but on the other hand reveal much about the artist’s personality. They speak of fears, visualize dreams, or nightmares, and recount memories. The dominance of the female figure as motive stands out: mothers, nuns, saints, seductresses, prisoners, damned ones. They are objects of desire, while desiring themselves. It strikes the observer that the figures mostly seem to hover on the paper—perspective plays almost no role in her compositions. Instead, they fixate the viewer with their gaze, radiating a certain voyeurism.

A key element in Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s drawings is her typography. The artist will often place words in the foreground, as a result of which they dominate the motive, indeed becoming the main subject. Or she distributes these words across the entire page, ignoring questions of grammatical correctness.

Sandra Vasquez de la Horra, b. 1967 in Viña del Mar, Chile, lives and works in Berlin. She has worked with Niels Borch Jensen Editions since 2012. Her works have been exhibited in several museums, such as Tate Modern, London, England; Musée National d’art Modèrne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, USA; Albertina, Vienna, Austria; Magazzino, Rome, Italy; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Musée d’Art Moderne de St-Etienne Métropole, Saint-Etienne, France; The Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands; Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany; Maison de la Culture, Namur, Belgium; Centro de Extensión del Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes, Valparaíso, Chile; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile.