Robert Zandvliet: Pink Moon

We are delighted to present the UK debut exhibition by Dutch artist Robert Zandvliet, Pink Moon, taking place at GRIMM London from 11 April - 25 May 2024. 

As an artist concerned with the combined act of observation and introspection, Zandvliet has dedicated his career to a deep understanding of the elements and foundations of painting, constantly honing his knowledge of his practice. This new series builds on Zandvliet’s decades-long fascination with the landscape as a framework to explore and understand the world, building on the legacy of Dutch landscape painting through his distinctive lens.

For Zandvliet’s first exhibition with GRIMM, he has developed a series of imagined landscapes that break down the archetype of his subject – a heather field, a moonrise, a melting snowscape, willow and dogwood trees. These motifs echo art historical fragments, captured with an economic and gestural brushstroke and combination of mediums 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 and create a vibrancy unique to the work, and even introducing textiles into his practice to test the boundaries of what a painting can mean. 

A dialogue between the paintings begins with the titular Pink Moon (2024) capturing a glowing moonrise using a combination of acrylic rolled rhythmically across the raw linen canvas with deep opaque Van Dyke brown oil paint; a technique echoed in the adjacent Schneesmeltze (2024). This piece references Swiss Impressionist Cuno Amiet’s Melting Snow of 1904, as moonlight reflects off the luminous pools of thawing ice on the canvas. The sharp vertical motions streaking the surface of the painting with impasto oil conjure a dense thicket around the bulbous willow trees on the horizon.

These vigorous vertical gestures occur throughout the series – evolved from early experiments in capturing the motion of movement through ice and grass using tools such as the imprint of a large spalter brush or edge of a piece of card – and can be found throughout the exhibition in works from Unitled (2018) to the vast textile piece Heather (2024). Created in collaboration with textile specialist Karin Zeedijk, Zandvliet refers to the piece as a painting that continues his investigation into colour that began with his series Le Corps de la Couleur (2022) in which he sought to investigate the essence of colour itself. The work captures the distinct grey/lavender shade of heather and its gradual fade from richer earthen tones to sheer, mistlike greys, punctuated with vibrant spots of purples, pinks, greens and yellows. Referencing the etymological branches of the word ‘heather’ which includes a technique of blending multiple coloured fibres to create a softer and more complex textile, the piece was built from a full-size sketch, transposing Zandvliet’s signature painting style into a thickly tufted textile work.

Over the course of nearly thirty years, Zandvliet has presented his work across Europe and the US and been the subject of major solo exhibitions with the Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL), De Pont Museum, Tilburg (NL) and the Kunstmuseum,  Bonn (DE). 

GRIMM represents the artist in London (UK), in close collaboration with Galerie Onrust in Amsterdam (NL). The artist is also represented by Peter Blum Gallery in New York, NY (US) and Bernhard Knaus Fine Art, Frankfurt am Main (DE).