Sandra Vasquez de la Horra

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra was born in Viña del Mar, Chile, in 1967 and has been living and working in Berlin since 2010. She studied Communication Design at the University of Viña del Mar from 1989 to 1994. In 1995, she moved to Germany and attended Jannis Kounellis’s class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as a guest student. From 1999 to 2002, she attended Rosemarie Trockel’s class at the same academy, also as a guest student, before undertaking postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Vásquez de la Horra developed her artistic practice in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, initially focusing on the body and its relationship to signs, fragments, and language. Her work draws on mythology, Indigenous cultures, spirituality, literature, and personal and collective histories, while addressing questions of identity, gender, sexuality, migration, and the experience of displacement. Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses drawing and painting as well as photography, film, performance, and installation. Drawing occupies a central position in her oeuvre. She creates enigmatic figures and hybrid creatures that combine human, animal, and vegetal features, often inhabiting a space between the real and the imaginary. Since 1997, she has worked with beeswax, soaking her drawings in the material and presenting them in experimental arrangements and installations. This process gives the works a distinctive material presence while connecting individual images into larger, spatial narratives. Her work is informed by both her Chilean upbringing and her many years in Germany, bringing together transnational and Indigenous perspectives with reflections on spirituality, nature, memory, and the human condition. Experiences of persecution, oppression, racism, and migration have also played an important role in her practice. Her visual language incorporates archetypes, dreams, memories, cultural references, and forms of spiritual knowledge, while maintaining a strong engagement with women’s and human rights. Vásquez de la Horra has presented her work extensively in international exhibitions and institutions. She participated in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022, and in 2024 the Denver Art Museum presented *The Awake Volcanoes*, a survey exhibition of her work that subsequently travelled to institutions in Chile, Argentina, and the United States. In 2025, Haus der Kunst in Munich presented *Sandra Vásquez de la Horra. Soy Energía*, the first institutional survey of her work in Europe. Her work has been recognised with several important distinctions, including the Hans Theo Richter Prize in 2021 and the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2023. The latter was awarded by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in recognition of a practice that brings together questions of gender and sexuality, intercultural reflection, spiritual practices, and archetypes of collective consciousness. An exhibition of more than sixty drawings, photographs, and objects accompanied the award at the Akademie der Künste in 2024. Through a practice rooted in drawing but extending across different media and spatial forms, Vásquez de la Horra constructs a poetic and complex visual world in which personal experience, collective memory, spirituality, cultural histories, and the natural world intersect. Her work continually moves between the intimate and the universal, using images and materials to explore the transformation of identity, memory, and experience across cultures and generations.