Robert Zandvliet | Pink Moon | GRIMM London

For his first exhibition in the UK with GRIMM, Robert Zandvliet has developed a series of imagined landscapes that break down the archetype of his subject – a field, a moonrise, an empty road, a willow tree. These motifs echo art historical fragments, captured with an economic and gestural brushstroke that highlight the abstraction of the landscape into shape, form, light and shadow. The compositions balance the immediacy of the viewer’s experience with the slower resolution of the influence, ideas and history that underline the world of Zandvliet’s painting. His minimal approach shifts and merges foreground and background, subject and negative space, to reorient the viewer’s perception of depth and surface.

Though nature acts as a catalyst for Zandvliet’s painting, the artist resists the impulse to translate the natural world through a realistic perspective. Instead, he deconstructs the elements of nature to their essence, seeking to capture what he describes as ‘an idea of landscape’. The resulting works fuse abstract and representational elements to reframe our perspective of the natural world. For Pink Moon, Zandvliet has experimented with scale and texture, adding oil to his egg tempera works to animate the surface of the painting.

GRIMM represents the artist in London (UK), in close collaboration with Galerie Onrust in Amsterdam (NL).

From Press Release GRIMM, London