Robert Zandvliet (b. Terband, Netherlands, 1970) lives and works in Haarlem, Netherlands. He received an MFA from De Ateliers, Amsterdam, Netherlands (1994). Solo exhibitions include Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands (2019); De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands (2014, 2005, 1997); Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands (2012); Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2005); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2001); Neues Kunstmuseum, Lucerne, Switzerland (2001); Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg, France (2000). Public collections include Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland; Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Strasbourg, France; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands; Museum de Pont, Tilburg, Netherlands; Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands. He is a recipient of the Prix de Rome (1994).

“Griis means ‘gray’ in Frisian. My motives for making this painting are more personal. I was born in the countryside of Friesland in the north of the Netherlands. When I was young, every morning we had to bike to school, and I remember the foggy gray sunrises. Everything disappeared in the fog and different grays were the illuminating light. I wanted to make a gray painting that is not depressing, but instead is colorful and uplifting. I tried to find the right balance between the different grays, the ultramarine-violet over sea green in the foreground, and ultramarine-pink over yellowish white in the background. By slowly painting over these colors many times, the image of the trees reflecting in the water disappears into a soft gray monochrome.”

— Robert Zandvliet on Griis

"In my studio I have several African linden plants. In the spring they grow fresh leaves and I love the bright and sparkling color of them. For the painting, I offer a closeup of a single leaf without the edges of it visible, so instead the focus is on its veins. I like the idea that the veins also create the image of a tree. It was important to me to find the correct micro and macro structures in the green. In the Netherlands we have a color that is called linde groen, and a linde is also a tree."

— Robert Zandvliet on Linde

“After painting the lighter-colored Inkarnaat, it was clear to me that I wanted to make a dark juxtaposition. I appreciate the hue of a very black surface, and especially when you can sometimes see a blueish shine in it, an almost metallic color. That is the reason why I chose to make the background shape in the middle of the painting with a metallic graphite pigment, to relate this feeling. It lightens up the blue and softens the main color of the image, black.”

— Robert Zandvliet on Ebony

“The image of Tangerine is influenced by the Milton Avery painting, Tangerine Moon and Wine Dark Sea. I love the idea that his moon is also the shape of a tangerine wedge, and that both are orange. For my painting since only a small part of it is orange, it took me a while to figure out how to find the correct background color. Eventually, it became very important that two-thirds of the painting remain unpainted linen, representing clouds. This area creates the correct tension for the painting; the non-color of the linen lets the orange drift and also emphasizes it.”

— Robert Zandvliet on Tangerine

“In this work I wanted to paint an azure-colored sky. In order to make the sky visible and not an abstract, blue monochrome, I depicted condensation trails and a corner of architecture. The crossing of the condensation trails creates a particular perspective point and gives the viewer a direction to look above. The color is denser and more intense in the center of the painting and thenfades away to the edges.”

— Robert Zandvliet on Azure

“I wanted to make a painting that visualized a tan hue, but it was particularly difficult to find the right image to represent it. When I researched oak bark, I found that it was used for tanning leather in the past. The word tanning in English is from the medieval Latin word tannum, or oak bark, and so I decided to use this as the image. The difficult part is that tan hues are dull and undefined. Thus, I painted the trunk in the center of the image with dark contours and the oak bark with oil paint to give the color more power and presence. The background with the vertical lines I painted with egg tempera because it has a softer and more translucent quality. I like the bold and unapproachable directness of the composition; it’s clear that it wasn’t painted to please the viewer.”

— Robert Zandvliet on Tan

"The color yellow always wants to leave the surface and it doesn’t like to be bordered by other colors. In this painting, I show the image of a yellow cab viewed from above that is crossing the painting diagonally. The cab is just at that point where your eye cannot grasp the yellow anymore because the whole image has this speed. For several weeks I worked on the different shades of yellow to make it either softer, brighter, more reddish-yellow, sharper, or more out of focus. Because of the reddish-yellow in combination with the black of the cab window and the idea of speed, I titled it Bumblebee."

— Robert Zandvliet on Bumblebee

​“Zandvliet uses wide brushes to create the impulses towards movement and changes of direction in his paintings. By himself mixing the pigments with egg, water, and linseed oil, he controls the consistency of the tempera paint, which does not become tangible as material and mass but instead is applied in a quite liquid state, whether opaque or transparent. Thus it permits loose movements which bring together impressions of power and lightness.”

— Volker Adolphs, Beyond the Horizon, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; De Pont Museum Tilburg, Netherlands, 2006

"His style leans heavily on the use of spalter brushes ranging from about eight inches to a foot wide, with which he makes short, sharp brushstrokes on the canvas. This signature 'Zandvliet stroke' is central to many of his works, keeping the composition airy and preventing the canvas from getting too crowded, as well as disrupting painterly illusion and thereby, at times allowing the artist to stake out a critical distance from his models."

— Hans den Hartog Jager, "Robert Zandvliet at Gemeentemuseum, The Hague," Artforum, October 2012

"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, Robert Zandvliet - Brushwood, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2006

"I feel connected to the Dutch tradition: it’s part of my nature, it’s the language that I understand. And I do recognize it. In the use of white, for instance - the white of Vermeer, of Weissenbruch, of Mondriaan, and even of De Kooning - it’s a white that has a spatial quality. I can’t really describe it…. It’s a place where the air can get through."

— Robert Zandvliet

“This is the reason why, when we apply the inanimate paint to a surface, we must, as it were, get the light behind the surface: we must spiritualize the whole surface and create a secret inner radiance. I mean, we must try to get the downward-streaming planetary influence behind the surface on which we paint the picture, so that the painting gives us organically the impression of the essential, not merely of the pictorial; and so it will depend on imparting the spiritual to the colors in order to paint inanimate nature.”

— Rudolf Steiner, lecture in Dornach, Switzerland, 1921

Robert Zandvliet developed the mural Aan 't Groothoofd as a site-specific work for the Dordrechts Museum in the Netherlands. Created between 2019-2020, it extends over a convex wall of more than 50 meters (164 feet). After consulting paintings in the museum’s collection, Zandvliet continued his investigations into the medium’s history and possibilities, and sought to create a connection between it and the museum as well as the city. The resulting mural is a panoramic water scene with a progression of colors changing from the light of morning to the dark of evening as a viewer walks along its length.

"In the end, I am always looking for that one image, that one form...I want to create a form that can tolerate any content, the perfect form, in a way. That may always remain my quest. And indeed, perhaps that is somewhere in objects such as a moon, a cloud or a stone, which on the one hand seem almost nothing, but can also encompass everything. I hope, of course, that my images become more and more bare, free of the irrelevant. That I'll keep on getting closer to the essence."

— Robert Zandvliet

"Black: represents the mind’s image of death
Green: represents the dead image of life
Peach blossom: represents the living image of the soul
White: represents the soul image of the spirit"

— Rudolf Steiner