Raquel van Haver was born in 1989 in Bogota, Colombia and graduated from HKU, Fine Arts, Utrecht, in 2012. 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. She lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
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.