Artist Database

Zander Blom is an abstract painter with a deep interest in earlier twentieth-century Euro-American abstract painting. Trained in graphic design, his first works were drawings, paper assemblies, sound collages and photographs of unusual painted and sculpted sets fashioned by the artist in his Brixton home in Johannesburg. Now based in Cape Town, Blom is mainly identified as a painter. In 2014, he won the third Jean-François Prat Prize for contemporary painting in Paris; his work is also included in Phaidon's anthology, Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting (2016). Blom's method is process-based and evolutionary, his canvases tending to progress through fixed series. Displeased with the capacities of brushes and oil sticks, Blom started applying his paint directly to his canvases using various palette knives, some even made by the artist. His use of impasto, gestural mark and pictorial structure, along with his exploitation of the oil paint's stain on unprimed Belgian linen, presents a distinctive painting style in South Africa. All of Blom's paintings are untitled, but for a numerical tag that situates each work in a timeline of his evolving practice.

Represented by Stevenson, Blom has held 10 solo shows at the gallery (between 2010 and 2022), the latest of which runs from 12 August to 30 September 2023. Additionally, he has participated in numerous solo and group shows in South Africa, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Mauritius, and the USA.