Notes

Perhaps the only truism about Zander Blom’s painting style is that he works in an abstract idiom. Change has been a constant of his practice. “I have believed in the idea of perpetual change as a vehicle for innovation and discovery in painting for a long time,” stated Blom in 2016. “Even though the overarching themes in my work have much remained the same over the last decade, my style and techniques have gone through many transformations.”¹ His output encompasses delicate pointillist works, jagged expressionist pieces and also austere experiments with suprematist composition. Blom’s restlessness is motivated by a desire to find new tools and techniques. This lot is from a series of oils from 2015 with marbled paint treatments and blocks of primary colors that obliquely reference Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Attitudinally, Blom is drawn to “warm-blooded chameleons” like Picasso over “stiff squares” like Mondrian, but acknowledges that Mondrian’s “singular devotion” to a very limited area of form as “profound”.² Blom’s technique in this work is sumptuous yet disciplined. The lot showcases his guileless and enraptured interest in high modernist painterly ideas regarding form, which he here tests, strains and even breaks in his search for renewal.

1. Sophie Perryer (ed.) (2016) Zander Blom: Paintings Volume II, 2013-2016. Cape Town: Stevenson. Page 287.
2. Ibid., page 351.

Literature

Sophie Perryer (ed.) (2016) Zander Blom: Paintings Volume II, 2013-2016, Cape Town: Stevenson. Illustrated in colour on page 287.