SANDRA VÁSQUEZ DE LA HORRA

Gomide&Co is pleased to present Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: todo lo que vibra, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Brazil, bringing together a group of drawings produced over the last five years. The opening will take place on May 28th (Thursday), at 6 pm, and the exhibition will remain on view at the gallery through July 18th. The exhibition is curated by independent curator and art critic Fernanda Morse.

Born in Viña del Mar, Chile, in 1967, and based in Berlin for more than fifteen years, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra has developed a singular practice centered on drawing, a medium that, in her work, transcends bidimensionality to assume both sculptural and installation-based dimensions. Since the late 1990s, the artist has finished her works by dipping them in wax, a process that lends greater plasticity and material presence to the drawings, intensifying the line and color while creating effects of depth and translucency. In addition, the wax contributes to the preservation of the works and enables the sculptural developments the artist has explored in recent years.

With an internationally established career, Vásquez de la Horra has recently been the subject of major institutional exhibitions: Soy Energía, her first institutional retrospective in Europe, presented at Haus der Kunst (Munich) in 2025; and The Awake Volcanoes, a career-spanning exhibition held at the Denver Art Museum in 2024, curated by Brazilian curator Raphael Fonseca. The artist was awarded the prestigious Käthe Kollwitz Prize by the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, in 2023, and participated in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.

Her work brings together references ranging from cinema and fairy tales to botanical and zoological compendiums, intertwined with personal experiences and broader historical contexts, such as the political repression she experienced in her youth under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. The traditions and mythologies of her Chilean background and Aymara ancestry play a central role in her work, alongside the knowledge systems and symbols associated with Afro-diasporic religions such as Santería, into which she was initiated in Cuba in 2003. Within this imagetic universe, religion, myth, sexuality, and uncanny elements coexist and collide, giving shape to narratives that evoke liminal experiences, states of transformation, and symbolic dimensions of the body.

The artist states: “Curiously, my work is not about imagination, as many people think. It has to do with my experience of the world, my relationship with the gods and with things. It is like a diary. The works are the result of the contact I establish with the elements, with the trees, with the birds, with the water, with everything around me. When they cut down a tree on the street where I live, I suffer, because the trees are my friends, you know?”

Recurring throughout her drawings, the female figure appears in constant mutation, at times as a generative and cosmic force, at others marked by dynamics of vulnerability and violence. Human, animal, and vegetal bodies merge in hybrid compositions where dreamlike landscapes and organic forms intertwine, suggesting cycles of life, death, and rebirth. At the same time, symbols associated with Indigenous traditions and marginalized cultures emerge as emblems that challenge historical and cultural narratives, especially within the context of Latin America. In more recent works, the artist has explored formal solutions that expand drawing into space, such as folds and structures that emphasize its tridimensional dimension.

Curator Fernanda Morse comments: “Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s work operates through a rich convergence of knowledge systems, cosmovisions, rituals, and symbolisms capable of expanding our worldview and activating our sensitivity toward all living things around us. Going beyond schisms and dualities, the images and forms created by Sandra connect inside and outside, body and spirit, sacred and profane, human and animal. Her work blurs boundaries and founds a universe in which the distance between nature and civilization no longer exists, and these concepts may finally collapse.”

The exhibition at Gomide&Co offers an insight into the recent development of the artist’s practice, highlighting the consistency of a body of work that sensitively and incisively investigates the relationships between body, spirituality, experience, and memory.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra is represented by Sprovieri gallery, to whom Gomide&Co extends its thanks for supporting the realization of the exhibition.