Jack Bell Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by contemporary artist Raquel van Haver.

In her second show with the gallery, Van Haver presents two new mural scale paintings along with a group of small intimate portraits. She works on burlap, often combining oil paint, charcoal, gypsum, newspaper and ash in heavily textured compositions.

Van Haver offers snapshots of daily life in the South-East of Amsterdam, Netherlands, where

the artist lives and works. She is interested in race and identity, drawing from African, Western, Caribbean and Latin American cultures within her community.

 

Her painting is raw

and masculine, at times monumental and energetic, at others dark and ominous. Negotiations between ‘self’ and ‘other’ appear as recurring themes. This new series continues to deal with social hierarchies in marginalised neighbourhoods. The paintings look

at the importance of Hip Hop as a mode of storytelling as well as the relationship between status and pack mentality.

 

The artist skillfully fuses great traditions of painting and the more contemporary practices of graffiti in her local surroundings.

She begins by collecting imagery, either found or from her own photography and sketches.

These are then deconstructed and fragmented through collage to produce a new reality. Surface and subject are finally merged into relief using thick layers of oil paint. The stories they tell are recognisable to the viewer, but left open and

inviting interpretation. 

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Text and credits for images Courtesy Jack Bell Gallery, London.