Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Robert Zandvliet surveying the last 25 years of his practice entitled, Florilegium: Overview 1998 – 2023.

The exhibition runs from January 31 - March 16, 2024 and there is an artist’s reception on Wednesday, January 31 from 6 – 8pm at 176 Grand Street, New York, NY.

Since the late 1990s, Robert Zandvliet has continually enriched the historical lineage of Dutch landscape painting in particular, and European art in general, with decisive new directions in composition, perception, and introspection. Being primarily concerned with the elemental or natural world, and what the artist calls "the idea of landscape," the exhibition "Florilegium: Overview 1998 - 2023" illustrates Zandvliet’s inventive pictorial solutions that fuse both abstract and representational elements. He pursues the very essence of a subject and simultaneously challenges viewers' habits of observation by resisting realism while drawing attention to painterly gestures and the medium itself.

Zandvliet has divided the exhibition into seven “chapters” focusing on themes or bodies of work from his evolving approach to painting over the last quarter century. Landscape has continually returned to him as a constant thread throughout his oeuvre. Always remaining committed to an intellectual exploration of the history of art including an examination of archetypal landscape motifs, he tests their relevance in a contemporary context. For Zandvliet’s newest series “Le Jardin,” featuring allover tableaus of interconnected networks of flora, he references Claude Monet’s “Nymphéas” paintings. These emphasize form, color, and the interlocking of foreground and background which lacks perspective. For Zandvliet though, his landscapes are not examinations of light or space, but a manner of creating an idealized and personal surrounding, while paradoxically attempting to remove himself from it. In his own words, he aims to “find the archetypes of my inner world.” Zandvliet’s other themes such as a rearview mirror or a stone also utilize highly reduced forms. These can first manifest themselves as abstractions with the subject later emerging, or conversely with the subject initially appearing and later fading away into gesture.

As Zandvliet describes: "I am not aiming to arrive at a specific style or handwriting. But there has always been an awareness of the material, the canvas, the paint, and the brushstroke." By frequently employing egg tempera that he mixes himself, Zandvliet lays down numerous thin, fluid, and semi-transparent layers with dynamic strokes from various brushes and rollers. In newer paintings, he has also employed oils and acrylics as details in the overall compositions creating distinct qualities of line, color, and depth. The artist has experimented with all these materials over the past decade in his small-scale, loose works on paper. Zandvliet comments: “Layer upon layer, these little landscapes arise intuitively. With an empty head and color on my brush, I feel free, skating across the paper.” These landscapes that have been reduced to an internalized essence, underscore looking and perceiving, which Zandvliet persistently renews in each series of works.

Signature

The problem with style is that it is too often used as an excuse. To quote Willem de Kooning, “Style is a fraud.” I am not aiming to arrive at a specific style or handwriting. But there has always been an awareness of the material, the canvas, the paint, and the brushstroke. In the beginning, there was the discovery of the block brush. When this was no longer sufficient, I mounted four brushes together to create a wider brushstroke. Next came the wallpaper brush. And eventually I replaced the brush with the repetitive imprint of the paint roller. But there was always that inner dissatisfaction—that my handwriting looked too smooth, too round, and too easygoing. Virtuosity. Obviously it gets in my way most of the time. I will end up somewhere without a brush, like the Chinese painter Gao Qipei, with only paint on my palms, fingers, and nails.

— Robert Zandvliet

Road Movie

In the 1965 film Pierrot le Fou, Jean-Luc Godard plays with the illusion of film and reality of filmmaking. During a wild car chase, the two protagonists argue with each other. At a certain point, the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, who plays Ferdinand, looks directly into the lens of the camera via his car’s rearview mirror and admonishes his costar to stop fighting so that “they” (the viewers) won’t hear everything. A reversal takes place. Ferdinand looks back. The viewer feels viewed. He is, as it were, pulled into the film and in the process confronted with himself.

— Robert Zandvliet

Moonlit

I am drawn to the moon and respect its cycles. I prime my canvases and make sketches at the time of the new moon. In the first quarter I reconsider my ideas and doubts. And the day before the full moon, I know exactly what and how I want to paint, and I do that fearlessly.

— Robert Zandvliet

Le Jardin

The Gaia hypothesis is a scientific hypothesis that states that the biosphere interacts with the nonliving environment in a way that creates a self-regulating complex system to maintain environmental conditions for life on earth. The hypothesis was formulated by scientist James Lovelock in the late 1960s. He described all living material on the planet as one organism and named it after the Greek goddess of the earth, Gaia. With this thought, I looked at my own backyard and marveled at all the different grasses, plants, shrubs, and branches, each with its own exceptional structure, shape, and color, but at the same time connected and interwoven with the vegetation in its own vicinity. I want to fathom the complexity of this network. To gain insight, I have to unravel the web and first visualize the singularity of one single leaf, one type of twig, grass, or reed.

— Robert Zandvliet

Heritage

Painting is an inexhaustible source and I have never experienced its history as a burden. So I have seen the zigzagging road to the horizon in Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, Max Beckmann’s View from the Ship’s Hatch or Milton Avery’s Hint of Autumn. Every image that I admire by my predecessors I can remake ruthlessly. By painting them again, I try to better understand certain subjects. The paintings I use as starting points can come from various style periods, crisscrossing art history. In most cases the paintings are also directly related to my own work. (For example, my “Seven Stones” series refers to Zhou Tang’s Strange Stone and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Black Rock.) The result is never a literal translation and certainly not a copy. It is an attempt to get closer to the core of the work, without disavowing myself. It provides an insight into my gaze.

— Robert Zandvliet

Aurora

I was born in the countryside of Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands. When I was young, every morning we biked to school, and I remember the foggy autumn sunrises. The horizon dissolves; the ditch side and the reflection of trees disappear into indefinable grays. A watery sun looms over the grove, pales the shreds of mist.

— Robert Zandvliet

Chronology

In the corner of my studio there is a table with about twenty half-painted sheets of paper on it. The recipe is simple and unchanged since 2004; size and subject are always the same. I rarely make a specific color for these works on paper; I just use the paint left over from large paintings. There is no preconceived plan, no specific idea about representation, color and/or gesture. Layer upon layer, these little landscapes arise intuitively. With an empty head and color on my brush, I feel free, skating across the paper.

— Robert Zandvliet