As an artist concerned with the combined act of observation and introspection, Zandvliet has dedicated his career to a deep understanding of the elements and foundations of painting, constantly honing his knowledge of his practice. This new series builds on Zandvliet’s decades-long fascination with the landscape as a framework to explore and understand the world, building on the legacy of Dutch landscape painting through his distinctive lens.
For Zandvliet’s first exhibition in the UK with GRIMM, he has developed a series of imagined landscapes that break down the archetype of his subject – a field, a moonrise, an empty road, a willow tree. These motifs echo art historical fragments, captured with an economic and gestural brushstroke that highlight the abstraction of the landscape into shape, form, light and shadow. The compositions balance the immediacy of the viewer’s experience with the slower resolution of the influence, ideas and history that underline the world of Zandvliet’s painting. His minimal approach shifts and merges foreground and background, subject and negative space, to reorient the viewer’s perception of depth and surface.
Though nature acts as a catalyst for Zandvliet’s painting, the artist resists the impulse to translate the natural world through a realistic perspective. Instead, he deconstructs the elements of nature to their essence, seeking to capture what he describes as ‘an idea of landscape’. The resulting works fuse abstract and representational elements to reframe our perspective of the natural world. For Pink Moon, Zandvliet has experimented with scale and texture, adding oil to his egg tempera works to animate the surface of the painting.
Over the course of nearly thirty years, Zandvliet has presented his work across Europe and the US and been the subject of major solo exhibitions with the Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL), De Pont Museum, Tilburg (NL) and the Kunstmuseum, Bonn (DE). GRIMM represents the artist in London (UK), in close collaboration with Galerie Onrust in Amsterdam (NL). The artist is also represented by Peter Blum Gallery in New York, NY (US) and Bernhard Knaus Fine Art, Frankfurt am Main (DE).
