Sandra Gamarra Heshiki
Title, Year
Details
10-color silkscreen with collage on Fabriano Rosaspina paper
27.56 x 35.43 in (70 x 90 cm)
Edition of 30
Publisher/printer: Pepe Herrera Taller Grafico Sl
Signed and numbered by the artist
Each work is unique, collage image and placement varies. Works will be sold in the order of the edition. See full PDF of edition here.
About the work
Sandra Gamarra Heshiki’s Mercancía (Goods), 2026, is part of an extensive body of work in which Sandra approaches the pictorial genre from a critical perspective. For this print Sandra combines the ideas of segregation and extractivism as central forces in the expansion first carried out by colonial powers and later inherited and aggressively amplified by contemporary economic structures. She reflects on systems of classification imposed by Western epistemologies, examining the enduring consequences of these frameworks both historically and in the present day.
A visual technology, with specific procedures, became part of a routine for the production of citizenship. The exhibition “translated,” through the exercise of order (and by exposing viewers to the training of the gaze), a vision of the world that condensed the evolutionist characteristics of universal history, along with an unquestioned faith in the rhetoric of progress.
Sandra Gamarra Heshiki said about Mercancía (Goods): To decolonize an institution such as the museum, which is inherently colonial, is to dismantle the notion of a past time and a future of progress. […] When I reference objects that participated in the construction of our nation-states, I draw upon that “single” history that appears fixed, immovable, neutral—almost innocent—in order to activate a shared visual memory and inscribe other readings onto it. […] Painting becomes a metaphor for temporalities that intersect and blur into one another.
About the artist
Sandra Gamarra Heshiki was born in Lima, Peru. She has participated in exhibitions such as the 29th São Paulo Biennial; the Italo-Latin American Pavilion (IILA) of the 53rd Venice Biennale; the 9th and 16th Cuenca Biennial; and at institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, and the Künstlerhaus, Vienna. She was the first Latin American artist to be exhibited at the Spanish Pavilion with her project Pinacoteca Migrante at the 60th Venice Biennial. Most recently, she opened her first major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art-MASP in Sao Paolo (2026), curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Her work is held in many public and private collections globally, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Tate Modern, London, England; MACBA (Museum of contemporary art of Barcelona), Barcelona, Spain; MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), São Paulo, Brazil; Basque Museum Art Center, Vitoria, Spain; Deutsche Bank Art Collection; MALI (Museo de Arte de Lima) Peru; MUSAC, León, Spain; MALI, Lima, Spain; MAR, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, among others.
