Sandra Vàsquez de la Horra at ICA LA

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Anillo de fuego (Ring of Fire) (2023). Graphite pencil, watercolor, gouache, and wax on paper, 84 × 62.25 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and ICA LA. Photo: Sandra Vásquez de la Horra.

Across the retrospective The Awake Volcanoes, exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s radiant watercolor strokes resolved into vast oceans, active volcanoes, and snowcapped mountains. If these shifting landscapes, painted with wax on paper, convey a message about navigating through the world, it is that migrant bodies, once set in motion, acquire the momentum to travel again and understand the multifaceted expansiveness of humanity. Born in Chile and raised during Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, Vásquez de la Horra moved in 1995 to study fine arts in Germany, where she has lived for the past four decades. Her retrospective traced a comparable trajectory. First presented at the Denver Art Museum, it traveled from Chile and Argentina to Los Angeles, where in a room complete with more than a hundred graphite drawings, watercolor paintings, and accordion-like paper sculptures, the experience of migration was given visual form. Within this dense display, the complex changes triggered by displacement are imagined through fantastical beings that are at once human, vegetal, and animal, altered by the distances they have crossed, where blooming flowers flaunt human facial expressions and reclining women morph into mountain ranges. For Vásquez de la Horra, the human body is a map marked by movement, and in her exhibition geographies, religious beliefs, and new memories were gathered, fused, and reassembled on paper, each drawing an index of both past identities and future selves.

Like an inventory of detailed cartographies, Vásquez de la Horra’s drawings, some dating back to the 1990s, map Chile’s coastal and Andean volcanic zones through bodily parts. In the massively-sized work spreading over four sheets of large paper in a square formation, Volcánica (The Volcanic Woman) (2023), a brown-skinned nude woman stands before ranges of blue and grey mountains. The smallest peaks take the form of protruding breasts, releasing smoke against a saturated red, clouded sky. Vásquez de la Horra adopts a freehand approach, drawing silhouettes with fine graphite lines that she then fills with deeply hued strokes of color. Breasts that morph into mountain ranges reappear in Anillo de fuego (Ring of Fire) (2023), which explicitly references the vast seismic belt of the Pacific Ocean, where tectonic plates, including those beneath the Andes, press against one another, producing the majority of the world’s volcanic eruptions. Towering in scale, the drawing presents a female body arching backward, whose abdomen rises with snowcapped volcanoes exhaling smoke. In both works, positioned only a few feet apart, the artist blurs the boundary between geological formations and human anatomy, proposing, perhaps, that the body functions as a repository of memory, where life experiences marked by movement and change accumulate, layer by layer, like the earth itself.

This continuity between the human body and the Earth extends to the spiritual dimension in Vásquez de la Horra’s work. After settling in Germany, she renewed her connection to ancestral religious traditions, particularly those of Cuba, which she visited after meeting a shaman who introduced her to Santería in 2000.¹ These encounters surface in the accordion-folded paper sculpture Yemanjá (2025), named after the Yoruba deity revered as the Mother of the Orishas, who is associated with the ocean and motherhood. Displayed on a plinth, Yemanjá’s mountainous silhouette transmutes into a reclining woman as the viewer approaches closer, with a fetus-like newborn penciled in place of her ear. In this transformation between mortals and deities, and between the tangible and immaterial, Vásquez de la Horra demonstrates how a person’s faith can also expand over time to embrace multiple ways of understanding the world at once.

Just as the exhibition entwined spiritual symbolism with geography, it also fused human anatomy with plant life in large-scale compositions assembled from multiple sheets of paper. The modest scale of the single sheet allows for a private, almost diaristic way of working, in which images are created individually and only later joined on the wall, as seen in Metamorfosis (Metamorphosis) (2023). From the mouth of a brown-haired human head, a flowering stem emerges. Creatures rest along its meandering path, including a black butterfly, two purple blossoms with human-like facial features, and a caterpillar whose face is a skull. As its title suggests, life unfolds through different stages of transformation, change the only constant. This process of becoming something else, of birthing new life and witnessing growth, finds visual parallels in the rising smoke of mountain ranges in Anillo de fuego and in the newborn figure that surfaces in Yemanjá, where human life, the earth, and plant life converge into a unified whole. For these fantastical beings, and in many ways for those experiencing the dislocation of migration, there is no clear distinction between what they have been and what they are becoming; existence is understood as a continual state of flux.

Throughout ICA LA, and especially in the salon-style wall display that assembled 71 graphite drawings, a sense of accumulation became vividly apparent. Here, the artist’s transnational experience was most visible through language: single words and short phrases appear in Spanish, German, and English. Within this arrangement of works, the 2009 eponymous drawing bore the phrase “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (The people united will never be defeated), written beside a man holding a black flag much taller than the height of his own body, the work is perhaps a metaphor for the weight of revolutionary ideals. First voiced as a 1970s Chilean protest chant, the phrase has long exceeded its original context, circulating across Latin America and reappearing in English-language protest songs, banners, and ephemera.² Words, in this sense, are not bound to a single language, just as migrants are not constrained to a single place. In this process of exchange, migration follows a reciprocal logic, one in which individuals absorb the beliefs and customs of a foreign culture while simultaneously leaving lasting traces upon it, becoming jointly and inseparably transformed.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Metamorfosis (Metamorphosis) (2023). Graphite pencil, watercolor, gouache (opaque watercolor), and wax on paper, 80 x 52.75 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and ICA LA. Photo: Sandra Vásquez de la Horra.

Nahui is a writer and curator based in Los Angeles. She currently serves as Assistant Curator at JOAN.

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