Sandra Gamarra Lima, Perú, b. 1972
Works
Biography
Photo credit Marta Jara
Sandra Gamarra (Lima, 1972) studied Fine Arts at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and at the University of Cuenca, Spain. She lives and works between Lima and Madrid. Her work is multidisciplinary and uses various media, such as sculpture, painting, video, texts and installation, to create critical works that explore the notion of modernity. Her approach focuses on artistic modernity and questions the place and mechanisms of exhibition spaces, museumization and pictorial tradition. In addition, she addresses historical and political aspects by documenting episodes of colonial abuse.
The artist incorporates methodologies such as archiving, documentation, appropriationism and the crossbreeding of non-artistic objects transferred to the field of art. In her work, she uses painting figuratively to question the mechanisms of representation, exhibition and commercialization of art. Through appropriation, her work challenges and reconfigures exhibition formats, altering the circuit of images and subverting established cultural property. In this way, she establishes a new narrative between the art object and the viewer. Her works investigates the absence of decolonial narratives within museums, revealing the biased representations of colonizers and the colonized. Within this field of study, sociology, politics, art history, and biology intertwine to provide a reinterpretation, where too often ignored consequences of history connect to present-day racism, migration, and extractivism in relation to both the ecological and museological crises.
Sandra Gamarra's work has been exhibited in important art events, such as the 11th Berlin Biennial, the 29th São Paulo Biennial, the IILA Mundus Novus Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennial and the 11th Cuenca Biennial. In addition, her works can be found in prominent collections, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Tate Modern in London, the Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin, the MoMA in New York, the MALI in Lima and the MAR in Rio de Janeiro, among others.