Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

Das archetypische Ich
Gutshaus Steglitz

Corporeal Drawings

The Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s (b. Viña del Mar, Chile, 1967; lives and works in Berlin) primary means of creative expression is the drawing, which she gives the finishing touch by dipping it in beeswax. This significant technique lends the works on paper a peculiar semitransparent and plastic effect; the latter is even more forceful in her more recent fanfolds and objects resembling houses. The artist’s rich symbolic formal language interweaves personal recollections with episodes from the collective memory, drawing, in particular, on her Chilean roots, the Pinochet military dictatorship, and Latin America’s complex history. Mortality, rebirth, sexuality, myths, and rituals as well as the idea of a union of man, cosmos, and nature are recurrent themes in her figural and expressive works.

Alluding to C.G. Jung’s theory of archetypes, which identified elements of the human imagination that, as contents of the collective unconscious, partly structure personal fantasies, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin, titled Das archetypische Ich, puts the focus on this interpenetration of the individual and the collective in the artist’s work. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition at Gutshaus Steglitz gathers around eighty works from the past twenty years for an overview of Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s complex oeuvre. With introductions by Raphael Fonseca, Jenny Graser und Friedhelm Mennekes.