Born in Chile, Vásquez de la Horra lived through Augusto Pinochet’s repressive dictatorial regime (1973–90), eventually leaving her home country in the 1990s to study art in Germany, where she continues to live and work today. Engaging with themes of mortality, trauma, ritual, and ecology, Vásquez de la Horra’s creative practice confronts the realities of subjugation and censorship through an ecofeminist sensibility and a visual vocabulary seeped in myth and mystery. At once magical and monstrous, familiar and strange, personal and universal, her works embrace fantasy, desire, and taboo as counterpoints to the horrors of patriarchal violence and as conduits to healing and liberation. Inspired by a constellation of spiritual mythologies and religious iconographies—ranging from the orixás of the Yoruba to the spirits of the Mapuche to the Catholic teachings of her youth—Vásquez de la Horra reimagines the world and our place within it, creating a cosmology all her own.

Central to Vásquez de la Horra’s work is an interest in human connections to plant life, animals, and land. This is particularly evident in the artist’s depictions of women, often rendered as surrealistic topographies with the body’s contours forming mountain ranges and horizon lines. Conflating body and landscape, she captures the expansiveness of life’s cycles—the pleasures of sex, the pains of pregnancy, the beauty of motherhood—and reveals the ways in which these cycles connect us to nature, ourselves, and one another. These ideas are further emphasized in a selection of works reminiscent of anatomical illustrations-turned-botanical studies that fuse human and plant forms. Often enshrining her drawings in organic beeswax, Vásquez de la Horra calls attention to the endless tensions and transformations of humans and the environment.

In a small landscape drawing from 1992, the following text appears atop an exploding volcano: “Late un fuego allí dentro,” which translates to “A fire beats within.” In Chile, volcanoes are a symbol of cultural pride and sacred power. A recurring motif throughout Vásquez de la Horra’s work, the volcano is a reminder that within every mountain, and within each of us, there is a fire that beats, waiting to erupt. Whether it awakens is only a matter of time.

Organized by the Denver Art Museum, after which it traveled to Chile and Argentina before coming to ICA LA, the exhibition and its related catalogue chronicle Vásquez de la Horra’s extensive explorations of the body, landscape, gender and sexuality, ritual and myth, and celebrate the artist’s significant contributions to the field.