Sandra Vásquez De La Horra’s Dreamlike Drawings Unite Nature and Humanity

As a young child visiting her grandparents in the Chilean countryside, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra went missing. “Nobody could find me. They searched for hours and hours, until finally they found me with a pig who had just given birth. I was sleeping with the piglets,” the artist recently recalled, beginning to laugh. “My relationship with nature is that I’m part of it. I don’t feel separation.”

For more than four decades, Vásquez de la Horra has made work that speaks to the profound connection between humanity and Mother Earth. Meditating on migration, sexuality, and gender, she creates drawings in graphite, gouache, and watercolor on handmade paper, which she then dips in beeswax or folds into delicate three-dimensional houses or accordion-like leporellos. Riddled with symbolism and inspired by religious and spiritual practices from around the world, her works feature figures who exist between dreams and reality: hips rendered as mountains, limbs as branches, eyes as leaves, veins as rivers, breasts as volcanoes.

Measuring 84 by 61 inches, Saludos a Olorum (2021), for instance, shows the body of a naked female figure in a field of saturated cobalt blue, her arms lifted as head and torso dissolve into a milky sun ringed with concentric rainbow bands. Yemanyá (2024–25), a three-part leporello, depicts a woman’s body emerging from cresting waves, rendered in full color on one side and sepia tones on the other. Both titles allude to deities of the African diasporic religion Santería: Olorúm, the supreme ruler of the heavens, and Yemanyá, the orixá of the ocean and motherhood.

Born in 1967 and raised in a Catholic family, Vásquez de la Horra came of age during Pinochet’s military regime, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. She grew up in the coastal town of Viña del Mar and made her first foray into the arts at 12, when her parents, hoping to channel her hyperactive energy, enrolled her in the Escuela Municipal de Bellas Artes de Valparaíso. “Art was the only thing I could do for hours and hours without any trouble,” she said.

In 1995, she moved to Germany to study at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She then went on to attend the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne during the early aughts, and later moved to Berlin, where she has been based ever since.

It was during the ’90s that Vásquez de la Horra adopted many of the stylistic choices she still favors today. She started working with handmade paper, inspired in part by fellow Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña, whose practice prioritizes precarious materials. Around this time, Vásquez de la Horra first started finishing her drawings by dipping them in beeswax, beginning with the series “Botánica de la Evolución” (1999). “I argued that we come from plants, not animals,” she said of that body of work. “I collected old plant illustrations and drew heads on them to explain how a seed is an embryo—a potential plant, a potential soul. I started dipping them into wax as an alchemical process. It felt like giving the works some kind of protection, an aura.”

Although Vásquez de la Horra has been making art for more than four decades, her practice reached a turning point when Cecilia Alemani included her in the 2022 Venice Biennale. For that exhibition, titled “The Milk of Dreams,” she installed her works within a wooden house structure: two-dimensional drawings lined the exterior walls, three-dimensional pieces filled shelves inside, and at the center stood one of her signature houses, assembled from handmade paper. The installation drew considerable attention, including from Raphael Fonseca, a curator at the Denver Art Museum, and from gallerist Tanya Bonakdar, who began representing her earlier this year.

“Before then, I didn’t know her work, and I was struck by her use of paper, her unique approach to the human body, and how she connects it to landscapes,” Fonseca recently told ARTnews. “Even though the work is very spiritual and mysterious, as an artist she is a deep researcher who always seems to be challenging herself.” That encounter led Fonseca to curate Vásquez de la Horra’s first museum show in the United States, “The Awake Volcanoes,” a sprawling retrospective at the Denver Art Museum in 2024; the exhibition then traveled to Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, and Los Angeles.

This week, Vásquez de la Horra will open her first New York solo show, “Reading the Waves,” at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea. Featuring a series of historical works and new pieces created by the artist on-site during the past month, the exhibition focuses on water and transmutation as its central motifs.

“For her first show with the gallery, Sandra is transforming the way that artworks inhabit the space,” Bonakdar said. “Her magical way of thinking is part of a larger gesture toward nature, an invitation to transcend our own limits. I feel that the work is very healing and rejuvenating, especially as we all look for ways to find solace and peace in a turbulent moment.”

Indeed, Vásquez de la Horra sees herself as a healer. To this end, she’s sought to personally discover and research a range of mystical practices that in turn inform her practice. “For me, relating to a religion or spiritual practice is about falling in love with a worldview,” she explained. “When I first turned to Buddhism, for example, I was meditating to build concentration skills, but then I discovered the idea of ‘karma,’ and it just fascinated me. Then I fell in love with Santería, and seeing the world through those beliefs changed everything. Now I look at a river and think, Oh wow, this is a divinity. There are so many layers—everything becomes magical.”

Speaking of the ways this relationship to the sacred has informed her process, Vásquez de la Horra described herself as a channel. “My work is not intellectual, it’s something that wants to speak through me, so it’s a surprise, even to me. Whatever wants to come comes, and I’m in the middle, like a medium, taking it all down,” she said.

Among the works on show in her New York debut will be Cósmicos (2023), a large-scale drawing of a palm rendered in soft graphite gray, its fingertips glowing with white orbs and a center resembling a face contoured by rainbow lines; Volcánica (2023), which featured in the DAM show and depicts two female figures within a landscape teeming with volcanoes beneath a smoky violet-and-crimson sky; and Sanando el Árbol (2026), a leporello of a woman’s body, this time featuring a tree emerging from the figure’s womb. 

During her time in New York prepping for the show, Vásquez de la Horra said she felt greatly influenced by the energy of the Hudson River: “I’ve been thinking a lot about the water crisis, we’re not gentle with what we have around us. We are these ecosystems. It’s a kind of collective suicide, what we’re doing to this planet. We’re destroying ourselves.”