We are pleased to present Robert Zandvliet - Paintings and Works on Paper: 1999-2020. Surveying the Dutch artist's practice and evolution over the past two decades, the online exhibition features early works and newly available paintings created within the last year. Please click "Inquire" below the artwork details to contact the gallery for more information.

Robert Zandvliet was born in Terband, Netherlands in 1970 and he lives and works in Haarlem, Netherlands. Hovering on the cusp of abstraction and representation, Zandvliet's work primarily uses landscape as a conceptual frame of reference. Recognizable representations have been replaced by gestural plays of line, color, and surface that shift and merge foreground and background, reorienting the viewer’s perception of depth and surface.

Zandvliet has had numerous solo museum exhibitions including at the Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands (2019), De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands (1997, 2005, 2014); the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (2012); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2005); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2001), the Neues Kunstmuseum, Luzern, Switzerland (2001); and the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg, France (2000).

“Brushstroke - line and form, movement, and trace of movement - create the painting in an immediately visible manner. The impression of gestural dynamism, however, provides no indication of the manner in which the pictures are created – they are most often not painted quickly. Zandvliet seeks, not emotional self-expression, but rather the correct picture. A stroke, a form, a color must fulfill a function within the picture.”

-Volker Adolphs, in exhibition catalogue, Beyond the Horizon, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, 2006

I’m not after a naturalistic rendering of light, but light that emerges from the painting itself. Before I start, the blank canvas is an over exposed image – that’s how I think of it. But as I paint with pigments, it becomes gradually darker. Rembrandt, you see, could put light onto the painting with the shine on a nose. For me, the light comes from behind; and with each layer that I add some of that light has to filter through.

-Robert Zandvliet

“Two conditions are fundamental to the conception of Robert Zandvliet’s work: ‘landscape’ is a topological concept that may look back onto a long tradition of landscape painting. Zandvliet starts from the topological concept and not from the topography of a landscape. But even outside the context of art, landscape today is an extremely determinate motif that appears as a fragment of rendered reality in quite different contexts and areas of life.”

-Andreas Fiedler, in exhibition catalogue, Brushwood, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2006