Sandra Vásquez de la Horra receives Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize 2023

The Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra has been awarded the 2023 Käthe-Kollwitz-Prize. The exhibition on the occasion of the award will be on display at the Academy of Arts from June to August 2024.
The jury of Academy members Ulrike Grossarth, Raimund Kummer and Ulrike Rosenbach honors Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, an artist whose visual language addresses conflicts that contemporary society around the world has to deal with. Her works bring together archetypes of our collective consciousness, gender issues and sexuality, cross-cultural reflections, and issues of spiritual practice.

Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, born in 1967 in Viña Del Mar in Chile, grew up in a time that – after the military junta putsch in 1973 and Augusto Pinochet came to power – was dominated by torture, kidnappings (Desaparecidos) and numerous human rights violations for more than 17 years. Only with the return to democracy in 1990 the population was able to deal with the history of the country again. The history of Chile has shaped Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s artistic work just as much as the examination of her family history, the history and mythologies of the indigenous population and the brutal colonial rule of Europeans in Central and South America.
At the center of Vásquez de la Horras’ drawings, sculptures and installations is the human being in his social and societal environment. Her large- and small-format drawings on paper and cardboard thrive on accuracy, compression and color. The dipping of her drawings into a wax bath leads to more depth and increases the stability of the paper, allowing leporello folds and thus spatial objects.
Sandra Vásquez de la Horra moved to Germany in 1995 and studied free art at the Art Academy Düsseldorf with Jannis Kounellis and Rosemarie Trockel. In a postgraduate course at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne she continued her education in the fields of photography, film and new media. In 2022 she took part in the 59th Biennale di Venezia. Sandra Vásquez de la Horra will be honored with extensive solo exhibitions in 2024 at the Denver Art Museum and in 2025 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.