The power of connection through an artist's eyes

Van Haver refers to her work as loud and spiritual paintings. Paintings who you can refer to as dreamscapes of collages that can bee seen as small windows to scenes from everyday life. paintings that sympathetically portray people around her. She works on burlap, combining oil paint, charcoal, resin, hair, paper, tar and ash in heavily textured compositions. The paintings explore colors, light, identity, meditation, presentation, spirituality, urbanism and the diaspora and drawing from African, Western, Caribbean and Latin American cultures within her community in the South-East of Amsterdam, Netherlands. More recently she has spent long periods abroad gathering source material in both West Africa and South America. Her works are often monumental in scale, at times dark and ominous, colorful and energetic and continue to negotiate boundaries between alienation and ricongition. Van Haver was born in 1989 in Bogota, Columbia. She lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Solo exhibitions include ‘Spirits of the Soil’ at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, November 2018 – April 2019. Her work has also been exhibited at the Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands, Lagos photo festival Nigeria and BOZAR Centre For Fine Art Brussels. She recently won the prestigious Dutch Royal Prize for Painting. And in 20219 she was awarded with the Amsterdam award. Van Haver graduated from HKU, Fine Arts, Utrecht, in 2012. Her last research called Amo a la reina were the artist is researchinh her own past and the stauts of female social leaders in the Colombian regions where she is using the tool of art to connect people. Because she says: connecting people in daily life is really important. Something so small can move mountains. This serie will be presented in 2020 and celebrated with several museum shows, gallery presentations and printed issues. https://youtu.be/bKPIkOwMCII https://www.raquelvanhaver.com/ https://www.jackbellgallery.com/artists/66-raquel-van-haver/overview/