Sandra Vásquez de la Horra. Soy Energía

The Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (born 1967 in Viña del Mar, Chile) combines transnational and indigenous perspectives in her multidisciplinary artistic practice. Her life's work, primarily in drawing and painting, but also in film and performance, encompasses complex events, stories, rituals and beliefs that are rooted both in her upbringing in Chile and in the many years she has lived in Germany.

"Soy Energía", her first institutional survey exhibition in Europe, is dedicated to her experimental practice, focussing on her spatial, energetic and global thinking. Based on the multi-perspectivity of her work, the exhibition invites visitors to encounter the artist's spiritual cosmos, which reconciles man and nature, and honours her commitment to self-determination, women's rights and human rights. Experiences of persecution, oppression and migration play a key role in this. Sandra Vásquez de la Horra has developed her own exhibition practice, which is derived from working with organic materials as well as extending scenographic approaches into the space and conveying touching existential experiences.

Vásquez de la Horra's early series of works were created during the rule of the Pinochet regime in Chile from the mid-1980s to the 1990s, in which she explored the body and its worldly embedding through signs, fragments and language. She creates drawings of fabulous hybrid creatures with human, animal and plant features that allude to the incompatibility of history and morality. She presents the works soaked in beeswax - a technique she has been using since 1997 - in experimental hangings to create multi-perspective stories and spatial constellations. In her first years in Europe, Vásquez de la Horra created video performances, which are now being shown for the first time. In them, she deals with both biographical and historically significant events and themes such as loneliness, separation and racism. The exhibition combines the historical dimension of the work with its development in the present day.

Curated by Jana Baumann with Marlene Mützel.

Last edited on 12.11.2025