Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Raquel van Haver’s Massive Mixed-Media Narratives

Raquel van Haver's mixed-media scenes on burlap, using materials like oils, charcoal, tar, wood, and more, offer riveting and socially conscious narratives. The works carry notes of street art and historical references, crafted in relief-style, varying planes. The artist was born in Bogota, Colombia, and she's currently based in Amsterdam.

Raquel van Haver‘s mixed-media scenes on burlap, using materials like oils, charcoal, tar, wood, and more, offer riveting and socially conscious narratives. The works carry notes of street art and historical references, crafted in relief-style, varying planes. The artist was born in Bogota, Colombia, and she’s currently based in Amsterdam.

“The artist skillfully fuses great traditions of painting and current practices of graffiti in her local surroundings,” a recent statement says. “She begins by collecting imagery, either found or from her own photography and sketches. These are then deconstructed and fragmented through collage to create new narratives. Surface and subject are finally sculpted into relief using thick layers of paint. The stories they tell are recognisable to the viewer, but left open and inviting interpretation.”

See more of her work below.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Serge Gay Jr.’s new monochromatic acrylic paintings reckon with American history and the voices long suppressed. In a new show at Art Attack SF, running Feb. 6-March 3, his new body of work is shown. "There’s a common belief of living in a world that is black and white; however there many shades of gray … and sometimes a bit of color,” the artist says.
In Jesse Mockrin's recent paintings, the artist quotes depictions of women and violence throughout the history of art, taking influence from Baroque work, Renaissance etchings, and other eras. In "Syrinx," currently running at Night Gallery, the artist crops these influences and places them side by side. (Mockrin was last featured on HiFructose.com here.) The gallery says that “she first category considers images of women under duress, while the second category reclaims the condemned figure of the witch as a feminist forebear.”
One of the most striking features of David Slone's high-definition portraits is his treatment of his subjects' skin. In each larger-than-life oil painting of an anonymous individual, Slone zeroes in on the way light hits the sitter's face. He shows us how a peach tone can fracture into dozens of different, subtle hues. Slone makes pores and hairs visible in the way they are only when we press our face up to someone else's. His works thrust his viewers into an intimate interaction with his subjects.
Kip Omolade's "Diovadiova Chrome" portrait series brings out the striking qualities of the human face. The artist takes inspiration from African folk art forms such as the ivory masks of Benin and the Ife bronze heads of Nigeria. He considers his work a contemporary exploration of the mask as a conduit between mankind and the spirit world. For his updated take on this timeworn subject matter, Omilade makes plaster casts of models' faces and uses them to create resin sculptures, which he coats with chrome and embellishes with fake eyelashes. The masks serve as reference material for Omolade's hyperrealist oil paintings, which pay homage to African cultural traditions in a novel way.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List