Patricia van Dalen (born in 1955 in Venezuela, with Dutch roots) is a Miami-based visual artist with a career that spans over forty years, dedicated to abstract painting, sculptural and ephemeral site-specific installations, and designing artworks for public and private architectural spaces.
Patricia van Dalen was born in Maracaibo, in western Venezuela. With a Dutch father and a Venezuelan mother, she lived her first years in Maracaibo and then moved with her family to Holland. In 1962, they moved back to Venezuela to live in Caracas. Van Dalen graduated from high school in 1970 and went on to study at the Institute of Design IDD Neumann Foundation (Instituto de Diseño Fundación Neumann-INCE) in Caracas, where she graduated in 1977 as a graphic designer. From 1980 to 1986, she collaborated with artist Yaacov Agam in a visual education program in Paris and then went back to Caracas. Since 2011, she has been based in Miami, FL, United States. Most of her artistic career was developed in Caracas, Venezuela, where she is recognized as a preeminent artist.
Career
Patricia Van Dalen taught at the Design Institute Foundation and at the Architecture School of the Central University of Venezuela, among other institutions, and frequently conducts visual language workshops in Miami.
Jardín Lumínico of Patricia Van Dalen, Autopista de Prados del Este, Caracas, Venezuela
Van Dalen´s work has been exhibited since 1978; she has been part of a great variety of individual and collective exhibitions, both in Venezuela and around the world, and her paintings are spread in both public and private collections. In 2011, Van Dalen earned the 2010 Established Artist AICA Award from the International Association of Art Critics / Venezuela Chapter. Van Dalen's work has contributed to mural art and artistic interventions in public spaces, like the 1,200 sq f Mural Jardín Lumínico in the Prados del Este Highway and Mural Pajaritos, both in Caracas and the main plaza floor Jardín de Calas, Río Caribe, a village in eastern Venezuela. Van Dalen also has extensive work in private residences in Venezuela and the US, where she has intervened on walls, ceilings, rooftops, pool areas, and floors as part of these places' interior and landscape design. Her interest in the social dimension of artistic production has led her to frequently incorporate installations and other kinds of ephemeral works into public spaces. Examples of this are the large-scale site-specific installation Luminous Gardens at the Fairchild Tropical Garden in 2003 (the program Art at Fairchild, held by the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, started with this striking installation, Luminous Gardens) and Fragmented Light, an ephemeral intervention of the stairway walls of the Miller Learning Center, at the University of Georgia, in Athens, GA. Her work has been collected by institutions such as the Museum of Latin American Art, MoLAA, Los Angeles, CA, US; Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Coral Gables, FL, US; and, in Caracas, Venezuela, the Museo de Bellas Artes, Galería de Arte Nacional, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, among others.
In Miami, Van Dalen took up photography in order to develop unusual bodies of work that she displayed in two solo shows: in December 2013, "High Voltage", and in 2017, "Ride the Rail", both in ArtMedia Gallery, Wynwood, Miami. The explorations with this medium that Van Dalen employed in her studies in the '70s have led her to find new ways to link up with her previous productions, unfolding new artistic configurations that are distinct from the former.
In 2014, Van Dalen created, by commission, the Data Hall, a permanent site-specific installation for the University of Miami Institute for Data Science and Computing. The mural consists of a set of motherboards, which originally formed a part of UM’s first supercomputer, named Pegasus. The boards were altered with plastic lacings that crisscross and converge into nodes in a scale-free network. These drawings not only communicate Van Dalen's interest in new ways of making art by combining aesthetically compatible materials and thereby producing paradoxical images; they also aid her in her attempts to comprehend the concept of data processing in a tactile and visual manner.
After leading a versatile career in Venezuela, Van Dalen has worked In the U.S. on different projects: lacquered wood assemblies, aluminum collages, stapled painted papers, paintings on canvas, collages on paper, photographic installations, rug designs, and a mural for a high rise building in Miami (unbuilt,) among others. Since 2021, Van Dalen has been working on an extensive body of work of sewn collages, on fabric, and on painted papers.
Also, since 1983, she has been conducting workshops and courses on the dynamics of visual language in different variations: in the past, teaching Color levels I and II at the Design Institute Foundation and Color workshops in museums and other cultural centers in Caracas; and in 2019, and 2020, art workshops at Miami Dade College as a Special Guest Artist. Currently, Van Dalen teaches visual culture through workshops on the dynamics of visual language in her studio and online.
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