From September 3, you can see a solo exhibition by Raquel van Haver in Kersgallery. This exhibition opens during the Opening of the Gallery Season, which will be festively celebrated in Amsterdam on Friday 3 and Saturday 4. This Dutch artist hardly needs an introduction: in 2018, her work was shown in a large-scale solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and in 2016, Forbes included her in their '30 under 30' list on the European art world, in which thirty promising talents under thirty were featured. In 2018, Van Haver also won the Royal Award for Modern Painting and a year later, she received the Amsterdamprijs voor de Kunst. Years before that, in 2012, Queen Beatrix bought one of her works for her collection.
When you describe the work of Van Haver, you automatically resort to terms like imposing, coarse, large and raw. Van Haver applies the paint using an impasto technique; in dollops of oil paint that are applied so thick and crusty that the work almost feels sculptural, like a relief. Van Haver: “For me, the paint cannot be thick enough, so I mix it with everything that is able to go in.” And with that she hardly exaggerates, because in her work, you will find elements like mobile phones, wood, plaster, ash, tar, resin, charcoal, cigarettes, beer caps, papier-mâché and large amounts of (fake) hair. For that reason, the largest work she showed in the Stedelijk Museum weighed a whopping three hundred kilos!
The multidisciplinary artist travels all over the world for the extensive research that precedes her paintings. She doesn’t visit the touristy spots, but rather the favelas, barrios and townships in major cities in Africa and South America. Thematically, the painter adds a multitude of extremely relevant subjects in her work: themes such as (art) history and the colonial past, diaspora, migration and identity, mixed with popular culture, emotions, music and universally shared experiences, norms and values.
Van Haver: “I saw no representation of myself. I often meet people with very remarkable life stories that are not often told in art, and that’s what I would like to show. I am a kind of documentary painter, with a journalistic side.” She was inspired in this by the famous African-American painter Kerry James Marshall, who only depicts black people, precisely because they are so underrepresented in the art historical canon. At the same time, the large format and her compositions betray her love for, among other things, Renaissance art and famous Dutch militia pieces. That way, she is able to express her fascination for group dynamics. She also plays with the idea that paintings are traditionally rectangular, by providing her work with whimsical, uneven edges. In some cases, her work also has an interactive character. In her solo at the Stedelijk, a gigantic work measuring 4 by 9 meters was fitted with a staircase that visitors were allowed to climb. That way, the visitors effectively became part of the scene — in which you saw people living, laughing and eating, in an almost universal way.
For her most recent work, the painter took her adoption history as a fluid starting point — Van Haver was born in Colombia and was adopted by a Dutch couple. In her native country, she went in search of powerful, female role models who are committed to social equality, in order to reflect on her own personal history. Van Haver depicted these women as modern representations of Mary.