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Sandra Vásquez De La Horra

SANDRA VÁSQUEZ DE LA HORRA

The Awake Volcanoes ICA Los Angeles 11 October 2025–1 March 2026 Los Angeles
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Press Release

With drawing as her primary medium, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (b. 1967, Viña del Mar, Chile) explores the relationship between the human body and the physical, psychological, and political landscapes it inhabits. Marking her first US solo exhibition, The Awake Volcanoes features four decades of drawings alongside etchings, paintings, and accordion-like paper sculptures that reveal the manifold ways in which the artist has consistently challenged the limits and possibilities of what a drawing is and can be.

Born in Chile, Vásquez de la Horra lived through Augusto Pinochet’s repressive dictatorial regime (1973–90), eventually leaving her home country in the 1990s to study art in Germany, where she continues to live and work today. Engaging with themes of mortality, trauma, ritual, and ecology, Vásquez de la Horra’s creative practice confronts the realities of subjugation and censorship through an ecofeminist sensibility and a visual vocabulary seeped in myth and mystery. At once magical and monstrous, familiar and strange, personal and universal, her works embrace fantasy, desire, and taboo as counterpoints to the horrors of patriarchal violence and as conduits to healing and liberation. Inspired by a constellation of spiritual mythologies and religious iconographies—ranging from the orixás of the Yoruba to the spirits of the Mapuche to the Catholic teachings of her youth—Vásquez de la Horra reimagines the world and our place within it, creating a cosmology all her own.

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About the Artist

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra is a Chilean contemporary artist known for wax-dipped drawings and sculptural works that weave together Catholic imagery, myth, sexuality, and the spectres of life under dictatorship. Working primarily on paper, she creates intensely psychological, often surreal tableaux that draw on Latin American magical realism, anthropology, and literature. Born in Viña del Mar in 1967, she lives and works in Berlin, with her works held in major museum collections in Europe and the United States.

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About the Gallery

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) is a contemporary art museum in the Arts District of Downtown Los Angeles, United States, known for cutting-edge exhibitions, artist residencies, and a rigorous public program. Housed in a 12,700-square-foot renovated industrial building designed by wHY Architecture under the leadership of Kulapat Yantrasast, the museum was founded in 1988 as the Santa Monica Museum of Art and reestablished in 2017 with its current identity and location.

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1717 E. 7th Street
Los Angeles
United States
Opening Hours
Wednesday, 12 – 6pm
Thursday, 12 – 7pm
Friday, 12 – 6pm
Saturday & Sunday, 11am – 6pm
Closed Mondays, Tuesdays, and public holidays
(1)
Los Angeles 1717 E. 7th Street
ICA Los Angeles contemporary art institution in Los Angeles United States
ICA Los Angeles
1717 E. 7th Street, Los Angeles, United States
+1 213 928 0833
http://www.theicala.org/en

Opening hours
Wednesday, 12 – 6pm
Thursday, 12 – 7pm
Friday, 12 – 6pm
Saturday & Sunday, 11am – 6pm
Closed Mondays, Tuesdays, and public holidays
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