Sandra Gamarra currently lives and works in Madrid. She studied Fine Arts at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, majoring in Painting, then went on to do a PhD at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Cuenca, Spain.

Her works tend to combine figurative painting with installations, through which she calls into question the Western art system and reflects on hegemonic mechanisms for the production and consumption of images. In 2002 she created an itinerant museum called LiMac (www.li-mac.org), which takes the form of an archive with appropriations, copies and replicas of other works, samples of the work of other artists, publications, artists’ books, simulations of catalogues, architectural projects and all the paraphernalia of museum merchandising. This was her response to the institutional void that existed in Peru in regard to contemporary art.

In her projects, figurative painting tends to adopt a mirror-image strategy that serves to question the formats and discourses of its exposition. Gamarra has stated that the very notion of contemporary art is western in origin, which is why her explorations seek confrontation between the concepts associated with that notion and the cultural output of Latin America, where translation and copying are often fundamental practices in igniting the memory of an object. She thus constructs alternative histories which are not necessarily linear in chronological terms. Her work brings together native cultures and hybrids with colonial forms of representation and domination. Genres with a legitimate place in the history of western art, such as landscape, still-life and self-portraits, are given a new meaning or recontextualised. The imaginations of other artists are mixed with that of Gamarra herself. In the exhibition ‘Good Governance’ (at the Alcalá 31 Gallery in Madrid and the Centre for Contemporary Art of Galicia, 2022), she presents a project in collaboration with other artists highlighting the burden of colonialism that lies behind the viewpoint perpetuated by traditional Western painting, the Spanish origin of Latin American nations and the need to review the ‘good governance’ of both legacies.

The ways in which nature and culture are represented from viewpoints imposed by the paradigms of European science and art are a constant in the works shown. The de-colonial, gender-based perspective that Gamarra has been developing since the late 1990s is also very much in evidence. One of her latest series is Reconstruction, which dates from 2021. It features oil paintings on paper that combine objects and fragments of pre-Hispanic archaeological items with plants of various species, like plates in a hybrid sketch pad that is part botany primer and part archaeology textbook.

Her works can be found in collections in Spain and elsewhere, including the Artium Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the MUSAC in León, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Patio Herreriano Museum of Contemporary Art in Valladolid, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Tate Modern in London, the MALI Art Museum in Lima, the Museu de Arte do Río (MAR) in Rio de Janeiro and the MoMA in New York, among others. She has exhibited at the 11th Berlin Biennale, the 29th São Paulo Biennial, the 53rd Vince Biennale, the Juana de Aizpuru Gallery, the Alcalá 31 Gallery and the Centre for Contemporary Art of Galicia.

Maite Méndez Baiges