Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, born 1967 in Chile, relies on one medium only: pencil and crayon on paper, often drawing on ordinary, everyday paper (such as the pre-printed pages of an accounting book). At the centre of her drawings stands the human figure. In her repertoire she draws on popular religion, superstitions and fairytales, and memories of Pinochet’s dictatorship, blending Latin American with European traditions. It is by way of a rather unusual next step that she gives her drawings their final and characteristic form: the artist immerses them in a bath of melted beewax, which clings to the paper as a yellowish-brownish film. After this procedure, the drawings are still easily visible as though seen through a soft-focus lens, now appearing translucent and strangely timeless. This aesthetic only serves to intensify the surreal content of the drawings. Their object-like character is further underlined by the artist’s habit of simply pinning her unframed works straight to the wall. For exhibitions, she usually combines up to forty drawings into one ‘bloc’.
From 1989 to 1994, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra studied visual communication at the university of Viña Del Mar in Chile. She then continued her studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany, first with Jannis Kounellis (1995-1996), then with Rosemarie Trockel (2000-2002). Her works have been shown in many solo and group exhibitions, and have been included in important collections, such as that of the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, of the Morgan Library in New York, and the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf.