New York, NY, March 18, 2009 – David Nolan Gallery is very pleased to announce that Sandra Vásquez de la Horra is this year's winner of The Daniel & Florence Guerlain Contemporary Art Foundation Drawing Prize. The award was announced earlier today at the Grand Palais in Paris to commence the opening day of the Artparis contemporary art fair. Each year, the prize is awarded to an artist who has recently gained recognition in the art market and by institutions, and for whom drawing constitutes a central role. Vásquez de la Horra was nominated alongside artists Frédérique Loutz and Jorge Queiroz.
Vásquez de la Horra's works will be on view for the duration of the fair at David Nolan Gallery (Booth D7). Her graphite drawings, hand-coated in a translucent layer of beeswax upon their completion, range in size from 9 x 6 inches to 40 x 27 inches. The works explore personal emotion and identity with themes including persecution, self-abandonment and sex, and cultural illusions, such as religion, myth and fables. The gallery will also exhibit works by: Richard Artschwager, Georg Baselitz, James Bishop, Carroll Dunham, Victoria Gitman, George Grosz, Barry Le Va, Henri Michaux, Jim Nutt, Gerhard Richter, and Alexander Ross.
Sandra Vásquez de la Horra was born in Chile in 1967. She graduated from the University for Design in Viña del Mar, Chile in 1994, and completed post-graduate studies at the Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne in 2003. She now lives in Düsseldorf, Germany, where she attended the famous Kunstakademie from 1995 to 2002. Vásquez de la Horra recently celebrated her first solo show in New York at David Nolan Gallery.
About the Prize
A commission composed of Daniel and Florence Guerlain, Emmanuelle Brugerolles, Curator of the Drawing Department at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Jonas Storsve, Curator in the Department of Graphic Art of the Musée national d'art moderne, and Carel Van Tuyll, Director of the Department of Graphic Arts at the Musée du Louvre, and selected private collectors nominated the three candidates. A panel of eight active contemporary collectors will interview each artist and review their portfolios before electing the winner, who will receive 15,000 euros; the runners up will receive 2,500 euros.