NEW YORK, NY.- Peter Blum Gallery is presenting 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.

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 Recognizable representations have been replaced by gestural plays of line, color, and surface that shift and merge foreground and background, reorienting the viewer’s perception of depth and surface.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).

“There is something magical about painting. The transformed image on the canvas is always both an illusion and an abstraction of reality." -Robert Zandvliet

“Since the mid-1990s Robert Zandvliet has struck a highly charged balance between representation and self-reflection in his paintings. Initially he took everyday motifs such as a hair clasp or a car’s rear-view mirror and, having reduced them to a minimum of panes and lines, enlarged them, sometimes to a huge extent. Following this he started to make groups of works, whose dynamic paint application underpins abstract pictorial structures yet also deliberately triggers particular associations. The viewer’s eye follows broad, sweeping brush strokes – only for a particular line to suddenly turn into a horizon. Yet, as his or her gaze roams feely through the landscape opening out in the painting, all at once it is drawn back into forceful brushwork and the tectonics of swirling colors.” -Andreas Fiedler, in exhibition catalogue, Das dobbelte Bild, Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland, 2013

“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

n 2005, I introduced the size 63 x 72 cm (24 3/4 x 28 3/8 inches), the ratio 7:8. I once read in an interview by Harold Rosenberg with Willem de Kooning that he often used this proportion because he liked shapes that are roughly square...With the horizontal option, the work remains compact but does not become too panoramic and when I turn it a quarter turn, the work stands clearly. But usually I choose the horizontal option because it most naturally relates to my subject: the landscape. -Robert Zandvliet