Peter Blum is pleased to announce Pier and Ocean, a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Robert Zandvliet opening Thursday, February 3rd at Peter Blum Soho, 99 Wooster Street, New York. There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, February 3, from 6 to 8 p.m. This will be Robert Zandvliet’s fourth solo exhibition with Peter Blum.

The works in the exhibition Pier and Ocean represent a new direction in Zandvliet’s oeuvre. Since 2009 Zandvliet has been working on a series of large paintings made after art historical works from a diverse range of periods and styles, from Picasso to lesser-known artists. Zandvliet deconstructs each work and examines how the artist solved the issue at hand. He observes, for example, the way in which the artist worked through composition or brushstroke and he reconstructs the work using his own visual language. In this “conversation” with the works, he is not commenting on the historical image itself, but rather questioning the direction of his own work and his position within art history.

Also for the first time, Zandvliet titles his works, utilizing the title from the historical work that served as his impetus. Representative of this is the painting Pier and Ocean, 2010, which is a transformation of Mondrian’s Pier and Ocean of 1915, and also from which the exhibition is entitled. Through the use of lyrical brushstrokes Zandvliet transforms Mondrian’s orderly abstract composition into his own. Similarly, Zandvliet’s interest in the balance of large solid brushstrokes with subtle delicate lines gives the feeling of movement and depth, as seen in the strong horizontal sweep of Winter bij Jouswier, 2010, a painting based on the work of 1975 by the Dutch artist Klaas Koopmans. Furthermore, the palette for this new group of works has altered into a sober array of blue grays and shimmering whites. There will be several small paintings as well as five unusually large format works on paper included in the exhibition.

Robert Zandvliet was born in 1970 in Terband, Holland. In 1994, he was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome after finishing in the same year a residence at the famous artist institute De Ateliers. He has had numerous solo museum exhibitions, including at the Museum Belvédère, Heerenveen, The Netherlands (2008); the De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art in Tilburg, The Netherlands (1997); the survey exhibition Peintures at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Strasbourg, France (2000); Brushwood at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and at the Neues Kunstmuseum Luzern (2001); Beyond the Horizon. Malerei 1994-2005 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn and the De Pont Museum for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands (2005).