"Los volcanes despiertos" (The Awakened Volcanoes), the solo exhibition of Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra at MALBA (Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires), offers a rare and compelling journey through nearly four decades of drawing, sculpture, and installation. Curated by Raphael Fonseca, Latin American art curator at the Denver Art Museum, the show is the artist’s first major retrospective in Latin America, following her participation in the 59th Venice Biennale and the reception of the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2023.
With over 190 works on display, the exhibition is structured around four thematic axes: A Fire Beats Inside, which explores the links between the human body and landscape; Botany of Evolution, a reflection on life cycles and transformation; The Thoughts, centered on the interweaving of images and language; and Deep Waters, which delves into the intersections between humanity, the unconscious, and the natural world. These sections allow the public to engage with Vásquez de la Horra’s recurring motifs—volcanoes, ancestral beings, and hybrid creatures—as embodiments of emotional and cultural memory.
Fonseca’s curatorial approach is refreshingly non-linear. Rather than offering a biographical or didactic reading, he opens a space of resonance: “Drawing, for Sandra, is a space of risk, intimacy, and resistance,” he explains. The show makes evident that drawing is not a preparatory act in her practice, but rather the core of her artistic inquiry—a territory where language and corporeality intertwine.
Vásquez is best known for her enigmatic pencil drawings on paper soaked in beeswax—a technique that gives the works a translucent, timeworn texture—, develops an idiosyncratic visual language that often fuses text and image. Her figures, rendered with delicate yet determined lines, often mutate, dissolve, or emerge from ambiguous landscapes. They are haunted bodies, liminal presences that suggest the unconscious, the ancestral, and the sacred, all at once.
Born in Viña del Mar in 1967 and based in Germany since the 1990s, Vásquez de la Horra studied under Jannis Kounellis at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her work bears the weight of Latin American post-dictatorship memory as much as it dialogues with European traditions of the grotesque and the mystical. This duality—geographical, spiritual, and aesthetic—resonates powerfully in The Awakened Volcanoes, where the female body appears as both vessel and volcano, bearer of trauma and of vital force.
This exhibition is not only a long-overdue recognition of one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Latin American art; it is also a vital space for confronting the eruptive undercurrents of history, gender, and imagination that her work so courageously exposes.
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| MALBA |
Fonseca’s curatorial approach is refreshingly non-linear. Rather than offering a biographical or didactic reading, he opens a space of resonance: “Drawing, for Sandra, is a space of risk, intimacy, and resistance,” he explains. The show makes evident that drawing is not a preparatory act in her practice, but rather the core of her artistic inquiry—a territory where language and corporeality intertwine.
 |
| MALBA |
Born in Viña del Mar in 1967 and based in Germany since the 1990s, Vásquez de la Horra studied under Jannis Kounellis at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her work bears the weight of Latin American post-dictatorship memory as much as it dialogues with European traditions of the grotesque and the mystical. This duality—geographical, spiritual, and aesthetic—resonates powerfully in The Awakened Volcanoes, where the female body appears as both vessel and volcano, bearer of trauma and of vital force.
This exhibition is not only a long-overdue recognition of one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Latin American art; it is also a vital space for confronting the eruptive undercurrents of history, gender, and imagination that her work so courageously exposes.
 |
| MALBA |
"Los Volcanes Despiertos"
Location: Malba, Junín 1930, Av. Pres. Figueroa Alcorta 3415, C1425CLA CABA, Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Opening Date: 10th April 2025
End Date: 28th July 2025
Working hours: Wednesday- Monday: 12pm to 8pm
Official website:
Mentioned Artist:
