Venezuelan visual artist Patricia Van Dalen has over 40 years’ experience creating in multiple mediums. From painting, collage, print, and photography, to sewing, stained glass, woodwork, and mosaics, Van Dalen does it all in captivating combinations of curated colours.
The shapes and aesthetics of many of her installations strike me as suitably tile-adjacent in their attitude, colour-blocked, layered, and angular, but with plenty of mosaics and ceramics in her portfolio, I don’t need to make any excuses to share her work.
Vibrant overlapping shapes with a few swirls and spots thrown in give a definite Memphis vibe to many of Van Dalen’s murals from the 90s and early 2000s. Others, such as the public Parajitos in Caracas make use of chunky mosaics to create playful images of colourful birds.
But her most exciting creations of all came about in 2019 after an invitation from the İznik Foundation in eastern Turkey. A unique series of tiles was designed in typical Van Dalen style where quadrilateral shapes not only hold blocks of intensely bold Iznikesque colour, but also inform the tile’s figure, adding and removing sections for an irregular outline.
A new post by Hanna Simpson, Diary of a Tile Addict, June 2024.