Raquel van Haver

Raquel van Haver (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary artist based between Amsterdam and Colombia, whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation. Known for her use of unconventional materials—such as oil, tar, ash, chalk, and found objects—her works are rich, tactile narratives that explore memory, community, and identity. She graduated from HKU, Fine Arts, Utrecht, in 2012 and her work has been exhibited at the Dordrechts Museum, Stedelijk Museum and BOZAR Centre For Fine Art Brussels. She recently won the prestigious Dutch Royal Prize for Painting. Van Haver refers to her work as ‘loud’ paintings that sympathetically portray people on the fringes of society. She works on burlap, combining oil paint, charcoal, resin, hair, paper, tar, and ash in heavily textured compositions. The paintings explore race and identity, 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 and continue to negotiate boundaries between social hierarchies. In 2016, Raquel van Haver travelled to South Africa. She was invited to make prints at David Krut Workshop (DKW) for a long week. These works became the starting point for a new body of work: the definition of a system, where she depicts topics about migration, oppression of the system, military forces, refugees, and politics on a globalized level. In early 2023, Van Haver collaborated with the David Krut Workshop to create a new series of unique prints. These works were visually inspired by the way light fragments through glass, and deal with issues relating to crime, insurance, and ownership in the city of Johannesburg. Van Haver was intrigued by the measures taken by local to protect their assets, measures which sometimes seem over-the-top and somewhat ridiculous. Many reoccurring iconological elements in this series are motifs resembling electric fencing and security fence spikes, a common sight in Joburg, playfully haloed around a central image. The central images are colourful and playful, marked with text indicative of the theme of that image. The text is reminiscent of graffiti as well as the style of illuminated script characteristic of the Catholic aesthetic.