Zander Blom
Current Review(s)
Black: the antithesis of the fraudulent sensuality of culture's façade. An experiment in voluntary asceticism.
Liza Grobler, Mary Wafer, Hentie van der Merwe, Zander Blom, Kathryn Smith and Nomthunzi Mashalaba at blank projectsFor blank’s last show in their Buitengracht Street space, the walls have been painted black. Ditto the floors and ceiling, and what with the blistering spotlights burning down from above, it’s a rather uncomfortable space to find oneself in. Standing on the floor in one corner a doll-sized figure captures the mood: she’s wreathed in layers of black and brown tights, unable to see out, yet seems to be gazing up at a sickle moon through a little jail window, drawn on the black wall with white chalk. This playful chalk drawing effectively turns the whole gallery into a jail; a touch of magical realism not unlike that of Robin Rhode.
For the show, curators Jonathan Garnham and Pierre Fouché challenged artists to undertake a vow of ‘voluntary asceticism’, producing work in black only. Being contrary by nature however, several of the artists took this as something of a challenge and Liza Grobler's Little White Lies is not the only work which shows signs of mutiny.
05 August 2009 - 25 August 2009
PAINTINGS. DRAWINGS. PHOTOS.
Zander Blom at Stevenson in Cape TownHitherto, Zander Blom has devoted his graffiti-style drawing, collage, assemblage and photography to a critical engagement with Modernism viewed from an often ironic Post-Modernist optic. In ‘The Drain of Progress’ he examined various Utopian movements – the millenarianism of De Stijl, the revolutionary agendas of Constructivism and Suprematism, and the Futurist idealization of the machine and the industrial metropolis. The ‘Travels of Bad’ cast a cold eye on Post-Impressionist primitivism, and the Gauguinesque urge to regenerate art by immersing oneself in the tribal culture of non-westernized races.
In his current show, the almost entirely self-taught young artist embraces painting for the first time, and turns his attention to abstract movements largely predicated on the belief that painting can release the unconscious. The abstract biomorphic Surrealism of Arp, Masson, Miro and Tanguy, the cult of automatism, American Abstract Expressionism, action painting, and to a lesser extent, European Art Informel, Tachisme and Cobra, are all grist to his mill.
Blom poured withering scorn on patent absurdities like the pie-in-the-sky, brave new worlds of Kandinsky and Mondrian, and the Futurist’s ludicrous belief in the ‘hygiene’ of war, and he remains dismissive of popular clichés about the ‘anguished and misunderstood absinthe-drinking genius who cannot pay his rent, and all that tortured soul shit’. However, the 28 year-old artist has matured and is no longer a snide cynic constructing irreverent piss-takes of 20th century artistic landmarks. On the contrary, this show indicates his reverence for the modern masters.
Belgian linen forms the support of all the paintings. This appears unprimed, but the artist reverses the standard procedure, and primes the back, rather than the front, of his canvas, so that the weave and colour of the fabric become an integral part of his painting, introducing historical overtones of the late 1940s and the 50s when abstraction became the regnant style of Europe and America. In works like Untitled 1.8, the brushwork varies from light, feathery touches, which leave just a wispy smear of pigment, to smooth, flat areas of unmodulated black and blue which have sunk completely into the canvas. Massively thick, chunky crusts of heavily moulded paint standing proud of the canvas in high relief take their place beside the obligatory splotches, splashes and dribbles.
09 September 2010 - 16 October 2010
Listings(s)
Black: the antithesis of the fraudulent sensuality of culture's façade. An experiment in voluntary asceticism.
Liza Grobler, Mary Wafer, Hentie van der Merwe, Zander Blom, Kathryn Smith and Nomthunzi Mashalaba at blank projectsInspired by the eternal-, yet sensual darkness of Adorno's observations on aesthetics & Anaïs Nin's multiplicative expansionist core, blank has decided to invite artists to engage in an experiment of voluntary asceticism, to produce an intimate work in which, formally, colour is reduced to black. Zander Blom, Liza Grobler, Nomthunzi Mashalaba, Kathryn Smith, Michael Taylor, Hentie van der Merwe and Mary Wafer are participating in this black-cube group exhibition.
05 August 2009 - 25 August 2009
'Alptraum'
Ed Young, Ian Grose, Wim Botha, Ruth Sacks, Linda Stupart, Zander Blom and Various Artists at Deutscher KunstlerbundLike George Orwell with his 'Room 101' in his predictive tale 1984, we all have our own version of what constitutes a nightmare, and for this reason, the project has been opened to a large number of artists whose many and varied personal nightmare versions, or visions, act to reflect this hugely variable human state of fears and fobias, pain and panic. 'Alptraum', the German for 'nightmare', is an artist-led project. It is a model which utilizes global communication between localized artist hubs and clusters to form an international grouping with the intent of opening a dialogue about this subject across borders and cultures in order to delve into the stuff and mind-murk that is collectively shared or completely random and unrelated, or individual and specific within the syndrome of 'The Nightmare'. Each artist draws on their own personal experience in order to visualize those anxieties, which take them beyond everyday dreams.
Working within the remit of the ‘artist-curated project’, all of the works in 'Alptraum' have been restricted in size and material in order to facilitate the low-cost postal transportation of the show from country to country. With each exhibition site taking responsibility to pass the show on to the next host, the number of works and artists may change or grow, and the approach to interpreting and hanging the show vary from space to space as the body of works meanders on from country to country. Having started in Washington DC and transferred to London, the exhibition is currently showing in Berlin. It will travel to Los Angeles next, followed by its arrival at blank projects in Cape Town. The Berlin iteration extends the exhibition to include the work of 19 South African artists, such as Sanell Aggenbach, Zander Blom, Ian Grose, Ruth Sacks, Linda Stupart, Wim Botha and Ed Young.
11 March 2011 - 15 April 2011
'The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989'
Ruth Sacks, Pieter Hugo, Zander Blom, Meschac Gaba and Moshekwa Langa at ZKM - Center for Art and Media KarlsruheGlobalization as a phase of geopolitical vicissitude of the world signifies a change in art and its circumstances of production and the possibilities of its distribution and perception. At the same time, artists and most of all the institutions of art – large-scale exhibitions, museums, the market – are confronted with the question of how far art can be and has to be thought of as global – and how this affects their own modes of production. With the aid of documentary materials and artistic standpoints, the exhibition 'The Global Contemporary' will demonstrate how globalization, with its dominant market mechanisms on the one hand, and its utopias of connectivity and liberalness on the other, influences the different spheres of art production and reception.
17 September 2011 - 05 February 2012
'New Paintings'
Zander Blom at Stevenson in Johannesburg
In the wake of his surprising show of gestural oil paintings at Stevenson in Cape Town in 2010, Zander Blom presents a fresh body of work titled ‘New Paintings’. The works continue his trend of using painting conceptually, and referencing Modernist idealism. Expect thick, guttural slashes of paint, many on unprimed Belgian linen, and the heavy smell of linseed oil.
27 October 2011 - 09 December 2011
'The Black Hole Universe'
Zander Blom at Galerie van der Mieden'The Black Hole Universe' is a long-term photographic book and exhibition project. It involves building makeshift installations in different gallery and studio spaces in cities around the world, and employing them to generate photographic still images for an imaginary futuristic sci-fi noir space film. Each installation functions as a set from a film, and each photographic image functions as a still from a specific scene within a particular chapter of the film. Although the project has many qualities of a film it lacks the main component, that is: a film. The intended final outcome for the project is a publication that contains a series of still images and texts, together with an exhibition of photographic prints and props from the installations. In addition to the photographic works, props and installations from the individual chapters will be shown in the cities in which they are produced, including Sao Paulo, Berlin, Antwerp, Brussels and Miami.
09 December 2010 - 22 January 2011
AVANT CAR GUARD, Jaco + Z-dog and Friends
Jan-Henri Booyens, Jaco Van Schalkwyk, Zander Blom and Michael MacGarry at blank projects"blank projects is our home-base/office-studio for group projects and collaborations from the 1st of December 2011 to the 20th of January 2012. We’ve all been working together since as early as 2004. We were offered this show at Blank Projects, and since we’ll all be in Cape Town over the Holiday season and we don’t have a central meeting point, we figured that Blank Projects could be just that. Some days we’ll be at the beach all day. For big chunks of the time we’ll be doing Christmas and New Years stuff with family and girlfriends/ fiancés. But we’ll also be at Blank from time to time, where we’ll be working on new AVANTCARGUARD shit, recording a new Jaco+Z-dog album, playing some shows, maybe we’ll even make a short film or two. We’ll also be inviting some collaborators and friends over. So come round to Blank if the weather is crap. Maybe we’ll be around making some new stuff. Bring your own beer. There’s coffee, tea and great food at the amazing deli next door, and if you’re looking for art, you’ll find it across the road. ALSO WE’LL HAVE A BIG CLOSING PARTY ON 20 JANUARY. BIG. HUGE"
01 December 2011 - 20 January 2012
'Ampersand' - A Dialogue of Contemporary Art from South Africa and the Daimler Art Collection
Athi Patra-Ruga, Dineo Bopape, Lerato Shadi, Willem Boshoff, Zander Blom and Michael MacGarry at Daimler ContemporaryIn the year of the Soccer World Cup in our country, the Daimler Art Collection aims to continue its lengthy history of addressing and promoting South Africa’s cultural development with an international contemporary art exhibition in Berlin. This presentation is arranged in dialogue form, juxtaposing current performative, conceptual and abstract tendencies in contemporary South African art with selected works from the Daimler Art Collection. At this event in Berlin, the Daimler Art Collection (which concentrates on abstract, avant-garde movements and reduced conceptual tendencies from Bauhaus to current contemporary art) presents mainly new acquisitions in the field of international contemporary art for the first time.
The presentation of the ‘Ampersand’ exhibition includes site-specific installations and video art as well as paintings, drawings and photography. About 60 works are shown. While the
exhibition does feature selected predecessors, its main thrust is directed at current works from recent years by younger artists (most of whom are between 30 and 40 years old). Works by fourteen international artists from the Daimler Art Collection are shown in a dialogue with sixteen South African artists.
Artists on show include Zander Blom, Dineo Bopape, Willem Boshoff, Kay Hassan, Nicholas Hlobo, Abrie Fourie, Lawrence Lemaoana, Michael MacGarry, Nandipha Mntambo, Athi-Patra Ruga, Lerato Shadie, Rowan Smith, Nontsikelelo Veleko, Mikhael Subotzky, Sue Williamson and James Webb.
10 June 2010 - 10 October 2010
PAINTINGS. DRAWINGS. PHOTOS.
Zander Blom at Stevenson in Cape TownIn Zander Blom's new body of work the artist shifts his focus away photographic images in which painting features as a distinctive element of his performative constructions, into oil painting proper. The show includes energetic painterly gestural abstractions on linen, drawings on paper, and a new series of stark black and white photographs that extend the concerns of his previous work.
09 September 2010 - 16 October 2010
