Notes

Trained as a graphic designer, Zander Blom’s earliest works included drawings, paper assemblies, sound collages and photographs of temporal environments and scenes created in the artist’s former home-studio in Brixton, Johannesburg. Now based in Cape Town, Blom’s studio paintings have been largely abstract in nature and evidence his interest in earlier twentieth-century Euro-American painting. His painting method is intuitive and process-based, new canvases often forming part of short-lived series that address particular techniques or histories of interest to the artist. This lot forms part of a suite of 20 paintings from 2014 that are characterised by their slight gestural marks, notably committed daubs and slathered drips. Isolated on the canvas, Blom offers these painted marks as phenomena worthy of consideration – like a brick abstracted from a building. Winner of the 2014 Jean-François Prat Prize for contemporary painting in Paris, Blom’s paintings are all untitled. A numerical tag usefully situates each work within Blom’s larger archive of painted images.  

Sean O'Toole

1. Zander Blom. (2014) Artists Statement for 2014 exhibition New Paintings at Stevenson, Cape Town [Online] Available: http://archive.stevenson.info/exhibitions/blom/index2014.html [8 December 2018].

Literature

Zander Blom. (2016) Paintings Volume II, 2013 - 2016, Cape Town: Stevenson. Illustrated in colour on page 281.