‘Robert Zandvliet knows how to fry an egg.’ These are the words with which Eli Content introduced the 24-year-old Zandvliet to Galerie Onrust in 1993. Content – the artist was a teacher at the academy in Kampen; Zandvliet was his student – described him as ‘someone who knows how to do things’.
Zandvliet and Galerie Onrust have now been working together for thirty years. Robert Zandvliet x Galerie Onrust: 30th Anniversary celebrates this fruitful collaboration, demonstrating, with four large works from different periods of Zandvliet’s oeuvre, how he constantly reinvents his art and yet remains true to himself.
Zandvliet made his debut with sensational paintings of everyday ‘objects’: a bus shelter, a chocolate bar, a rear-view mirror – nothing more and nothing less – which he depicted as objectively as possible. Not that bus shelter or this chocolate bar, but the object in question, isolated from reality and stripped of all frills and trimmings, in order to capture its essence. Zandvliet’s decision in 1996 to abandon this successful series came as a surprise, too. There was still so much more to discover. That year’s hairpins – object and line in one – formed the perfect transition to the landscapes that then became his primary focus, as he created various series that further explored his curiosity about brushstroke, structure and colour and their essence. Each series raised a new question, which he aimed to address in a subsequent series. For example, in I owe you the truth in painting, he looked at paintings by artists he admired. Where was the challenge in such a canvas? What were the dilemmas that these artists must have encountered? And above all: how would Zandvliet himself solve the issues? This resulted in La Tasca della Giacca, based on a work by Domenico Gnolli, a fascinating piece in which Zandvliet translates Gnolli’s meticulously painted woven fabric into subtly rhythmic prints of his block brush, turning it into a typical Zandvliet, without losing the intimacy of Gnolli’s canvas.
Meanwhile, another development was taking place. At first, Zandvliet allowed the frame of his paintings to be...
