Robert Zandvliet Born 1970, Terband (NL)
Lives and works in Haarlem (NL)

Over the course of nearly thirty years, Robert Zandvliet has presented his work across Europe and the US and has been the subject of major solo exhibitions with several museums. His approach to painting evolves gradually through time – constantly questioning, honing and expanding his understanding of each element within his practice.

Zandvliet made his debut with a series of paintings of everyday objects: a hairpin, a rearview mirror or a cinema screen, exhibited in 1996 at Witte de With (now Kunstinstituut Melly) in Rotterdam. Using only a few contours and colour planes, Zandvliet reduced them to their essence, exploring the tension between the depicted object and the painted form. These works were the subject of his first institutional exhibitions in the Netherlands, at the Dordrechts Museum in 1996, and at De Pont Museum in Tilburg in 1997.

In 2000, the Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain in Strasbourg, France, presented Zandvliet’s first major exhibition outside the Netherlands, showing his recent and new paintings of objects and landscapes. This was followed by the exhibition Brushwood at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Kunstmuseum in Luzern in 2001, which mainly included work related to landscape. Zandvliet approaches the theme of landscape as an archetype, focusing on the pictorial representation of landscape-like qualities: vastness, light, spatial dynamics, a changeable and fluctuating quality or, on the contrary, a tranquil and timeless one.

The exhibition Beyond the Horizon at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn and De Pont Museum in Tilburg was his first retrospective and included paintings from 1994 until 2005 – the year this exhibition took place. As described in the exhibition text: by continually redefining its potential - in terms of form and image, expression and composition, surface and space - Zandvliet ultimately deals with painting itself and with the endless search for possibilities beyond the horizon, beyond the known.

For his exhibition, I owe you the truth in painting, at the Gemeentemuseum (now Kunstmuseum) in The Hague in 2012, Zandvliet further explored the art of painting, engaging in a dialogue with existing paintings from various periods in art history. He examined the work of the artists before him in order to reflect upon and deepen his understanding of painting. This was also the starting point of his exhibition Regen in Schuine Strepen at the Vincent van Gogh Huis in Zundert in 2015, for which he responded to the painting Rain in Auvers that Van Gogh made towards the end of his life.

Since then, Zandvliet has worked on several more distinguished series and exhibited these bodies of work widely, for example, Seven Stones, Stage of Being, Le Corps de la Couleur, and Paradaidha, which have been shown at institutions as well as galleries, including Galerie Onrust in Amsterdam, Peter Blum Gallery in New York, Galerie Friedrich in Basel, Galerie Bernard Knaus in Frankfurt am Main, and GRIMM in London. Zandvliet’s career has been one of constant evolution and experimentation, exploring the interplay of light and shadow, ideas around authenticity and reproduction, the materiality of the canvas and the distinct qualities of line, colour and depth to relate to objects, landscape and space. Using landscape as a framework, his minimal approach shifts and merges foreground and background, subject and negative space, to reorient the viewer’s perception of depth and surface.

Robert Zandvliet (b. 1970 in Terband, NL) lives and works in Haarlem (NL). He received an MFA from De Ateliers, Amsterdam (NL) in 1994. He is a recipient of the Prix de Rome (1994), the Charlotte Köhler Prize (1998) and the Wolvecamp Prize (2004).                           
Recent exhibitions include: Pink Moon, GRIMM, London (UK); Florilegium: Overview 1998 – 2023, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY (US); Hint of Spring, Galerie Onrust, Amsterdam (NL); Le corps de la couleur, Galerie Bernard Knaus, Frankfurt am Main (DE); Beyond These Walls, AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL) and My World, curated by Hans den Hartog Jager, Singer Laren, Laren (NL). 

His work is part of prominent collections such as ABN AMRO Art Foundation (NL); AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); Colby College, Museum of Art, Waterville, ME (US); De Nederlandsche Bank (NL); De Vleeshal, Middelburg (NL); The David and Indré Roberts Collection, London (UK); Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht (NL); THE EKARD COLLECTION; H + F Collection, Rotterdam (NL); KPN Art Collection, The Hague (NL); Kunstmuseum, Bonn (DE); Kunstmuseum, Luzern (CH); Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA (US); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg (FR); Museum Belvédère, Heerenveen (NL); De Pont Museum, Tilburg (NL); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (NL); M HKA, Antwerp (BE); Rijksmuseum Collection (NL); Rabobank Art Collection (NL) and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL) among others.