At a young age Robert Zandvliet already began to earn praise for his paintings. In 1996 he made use of a guest studio at De Pont, and the museum acquired his work for the collection. In recent years he has had success with presentations abroad. The large retrospective shown in Bonn this past summer, which included paintings from public and private collections throughout Europe and the United States, is now being shown at De Pont. With this exhibition Zandvliet emerges, in a convincing manner, as a painter who has developed his very own 'handwriting' and visual language.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication including articles by Volker Adolphs and Max Wechsler, as well as an interview by Hans den Hartog Jager.
During the mid nineties, Zandvliet gained a reputation with his paintings of everyday objects - a television, a camera, a chocolate bar, a hairpin - which he rendered in broadly painted areas of color and outlines. The thin tempera paint (a mixture of egg yolk, water, linseed oil and pigment) gives the images a clear and transparent character. While traveling in Italy, Zandvliet became fascinated by the ancient fresco technique, in which the paint had to be applied quickly and without corrections. That same confidence can be found in Zandvliet's execution of line. His early works involve monumental forms and intense color. With limited means, a great sense of space is evoked. The 'film screens' and windows are particularly grand and panoramic. Zandvliet paints on the borderline, so to speak, between abstraction and figuration. The forms are recognizable and yet seem to be no more than a pretext to arrive at his own visual language.
Toward the end of the nineties, the images become somewhat looser, the movement of painting more dynamic. The exhibition Brushwood at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2001) mainly included work related to landscape. Zandvliet uses the theme of landscape as a metaphor for painterly space, which he manages to conjure forth with broad bands of color and dashing movements of the brush. Among the artists who serve as examples for him are the seventeenth-century figures Hercules...
