Drawing Light From The Dark Arts
By Chris Phillips
We visit Sandra Vásquez de la Horra at her studio apartment in Berlin—along with her macabre creatures. Little did we know we were entering a world of great sensibility, adorned with dark artwork that would leave our minds a bit brighter.
Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, "Entre el cielo y la tierra"
Although very well established in Europe, Chilean-born, Berlin-based Vásquez de la Horra is still being discovered by collectors on this side of the Atlantic, but her base here is growing: Four American visitors to this show's opening who has not heard of the artist purchased works on the spot. In the very first days of the exhibition, whose title translates to "Between Heaven and Earth," nearly half of the 91 wax-dipped graphite drawings, priced between $2,000 and $12,000, were sold. The drawings feature texts, magical underworld demons, and reptilian femail nudes in quasispiritual, political, and intensely personal narratives that over the years have formed a kind of intricate, fragmented folklore. The gallery has previously sold to many European collections, including Centre Pompidou, in Paris, which had acquired no fewer than 30 drawings from the gallery. (The Guerlain Foundation has since donated an additional large group, bringing the museum's total to nearly 100.) Immediately after the artist's participation in the Sao Paulo Bienal, still more museums came forward to purchase small groups of drawings.
Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, "Entre el cielo y la tierra"
By Paul Laster
A Chilean artist who grew up under the oppressive Pinochet regime, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra studied graphic design and typography in her homeland before moving to Germany in 1995. Arriving in Düsseldorf at age 28, she studied at the prestigious Kunstakademie, developing a psychologically charged style of figurative drawings done on modestly sized pieces of paper that are then dipped in beeswax and pinned to the wall in poetic, nonnarrative arrangements. For her second solo show in New York, the artist presents nearly 100 of these raw graphite works, which boldly examine sex, death, politics and religion.
Elles@CentrePompidou
By Katherine Chan
"Elles@centrepompidou" comprises works, culled from the Pompidou's own collection, created by more than 200 women artists from the early Modernist era to the present day. The exhibition touts itself as the first of its kind at a major national museum, and indeed, it makes one wonder why there have not been more shows devoted to women's contributions to art. Featuring photographs, documents, and films of such celebrated feminist works as the groundbreaking, body-oriented performance piece Meat Joy (1964) by Carolee Schneemann and similar pieces by Orlan and Valie Export, "Elles" presents the woman's movement as one of the most crucial political and cultural developments since World War II. Andrea Fraser comments on museums' power hierarchies with her famous performance piece Museum Highlights (1989), displayed as a video alongside other institutional critiques by 1980s artists like Louise Lawler. Drawings by the contemporary Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra offer a humorous and dark vision of her personal world, marked by violence and carnal desire. Charlotte Perriand and Zaha Hadid round out the exhibition, representing exceptional women in the male-dominated fields of design and architecture. Organized by themes such as the Activist Body and A Room of One's Own, "Elles" does not attempt to rewrite the history of women's art or to make any grand statements about gender inequalities in the galleries of prominent arts institutions. What it does do is to reveal the extraordinary talents of women artists and celebrate them with flair.
Sandra Vásquez de la Horra
The Chilean artist's surrealistic, cannily crude wax-coated pencil drawings split differences between Goyaesque phantasmagoria and op-ed illustration. Themes of sexual abjection, political violence, and death are advanced with sardonic, ambiguous zeal—relishing as much as deploring the depicted horrors. The use of wax gives the drawings, which often incorporate titles or captions, arresting physical density, but Vásquez de la Horra's imaginative project gains little in being displayed that it couldn't achieve in reproduction or, for that matter, in poetic paraphrase. How she thinks intrigues more strongly than what she makes.
Sandra Vásquez de la Horra
By Sprovieri Progetti
Alighiero e Boetti used to say that writing with the left hand is drawing. William Black depicted Urizen, the Zoa (or emanation of the fallen primal man) representing repressive reason and authority, as an old man writing with both hands. In Sandra Vàsquez de la Horra's video "Hemispherios: Eine politische Biografie im Kontext der Chilenischen Diktaturzeit (Hemispherios: A Political Biography in the Context of the Chilean Dictatorship)," 2002, the camera looks down from the Chilean artist, who, like an allegory of Justice, is blindfolded and writes page after page with both hands in a large volume, each hand mirroring the other so that the letters on each left-hand page are reversed. As she leans forward to write, her body blocks our view, making it impossible to read her words; but as each spread is filled, she sits back, revealing its content for a moment before she flips the page and goes on. Her life story is inscribed in a litany of phrases, names, sometimes just detached words--not a narrative or even a chronicle, yet eloquent enough for the viewer to discern the artist's sense of incapacity in the face of murder, disappearances, torture, exile, and mourning, but also of solidarity and hope.