Room – Sandra Vasquez De La Horra. Aguas Profundas

Where and when

From

12July 2019

17October 2019

Museo Novecento

Ground Floor

Vásquez de la Horra studied with Jannis Kounellis and Rosemarie Trockel and has won major awards such as the Prix de dessin Daniel & Florence Guerlain. The exhibition at the Museo Novecento is a unique opportunity to observe a body of works belonging to the production of recent years. In addition, some works were created specifically for the occasion, after the artist was inspired by the works of Mario Sironi present in the permanent collection.

Exhibition Hours

Summer Hours

Monday – Sunday

11:00 am

–

8:00 pm

Thursday

The Museo Novecento inaugurates the first solo exhibition in an Italian museum of the Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (Viña del Mar, Chile, 1967), curated by Rubina Romanelli.
The exhibition, within the Room space, continues the cycle of exhibitions of female artists that began with Maria Lai and later with the duo Goldschmied & Chiari.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra works with the medium of drawing which she then dips in wax and from this she is forever “sealed”, giving it a translucent skin and a sense of depth. The powerful images that inhabit his works come from the unconscious, from memory, from cross-cultural research, from a syncretic vision of religions and from an almost anthropological approach to the world.

Crediti Leonardo Morfini.

The artist grew up in a conservative Catholic family during the bloody dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973- 1990). His drawings often have women or figures as protagonists, who appear in an empty environment, without a background, in surreal or fantastic, risky, sometimes erotic positions or situations. The broad symbolic vocabulary from which it draws also evokes the complex history of Latin America, often made up of brutal clashes and submissions that dramatically persevere to this day. The drawings, nailed directly to the walls, in their nakedness leave no way out and impose themselves on the viewer, displacing him, imposing a direct and sometimes violent dialogue. His style and symbolic vocabulary are highly recognizable.

While in the past he has worked on small drawings by placing them on the walls in compositions and juxtapositions, in his most recent work he has developed large formats which are presented here together with the recent three-dimensional developments of his work: the “houses” and the “leporelli”. These undergo the same treatment as the drawings, they are first drawn, then immersed in wax and have the characteristic of uniting two mediums that rarely coexist: drawing and sculpture.

Crediti Leonardo Morfini.

The first house was conceived starting from the memory of the modernist house in Viña del Mar where the artist lived as a child and which is still a source of great inspiration. A further development of his work is presented at the Museo Novecento: his first “open” house, created for this exhibition and inspired by Mario Sironi whose work the artist admired during his first visit to the Museo Novecento. This, unlike the previous ones, is designed in its interior and similar to a theater, with a decidedly more varied chromatic use than the works of the past and inspired, says the artist, also by the Florentine stay and by the Renaissance perspective canons.

The leporelli, which consist of sheets of paper folded like an accordion, are books / sculptures that announce themselves vertically to the world. Also presented is the small sculpture “Yo soy Casa”, the artist’s latest production and the first of a new series never exhibited before.

In “Lazarus“, a now awakened Asian-looking Lazarus walking flanked by two dogs, evokes the Chinese migratory movement towards Latin America. In the same way, the drawing “América sin Fronteras” shows a mother earth from which characters enter and leave freely, in a fluidity of borders. “You Are Always on My Mind” could refer to the famous song of the 70s also interpreted by Elvis Presley and which speaks of a nostalgic love, or perhaps it refers to the obsession that captures the artist in her research.

“Aguas Profundas” represents a man who falls headlong, a pindaric leap or perhaps the unknown destiny towards which each of us is forced to go; it could also put us in front of a fragment of that dark moment in history in which the prisoners, later called disappeared, were thrown from airplanes to life. Surely it is Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s desire to go deeper, in search of meanings, in deep waters.