Strauss & co - 6 March 2017, Cape Town

316 574 Zander BLOM SOUTH AFRICAN 1982– Untitled 1.698 signed and dated 2015, Feb, on the reverse oil on linen 198 by 130 cm R  –   Stevenson Gallery label adhered to the reverse. LITERATURE: Zander Blom. (2016) Paintings: Volume II 2013-16 , Cape Town: Stevenson. Illustrated in colour on page 286. 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 mostly 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 current anthology, Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting (2016). Blom’s method is process-based and evolutionary, his canvases tending to progress through fixed series. This lot forms part of a small suite of paintings featuring atomised blocks of colour, notably black, yellow and lilac, along with marbled paint treatments. 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. “My painting practice is driven by finding new tools and developing new techniques,”he wrote in 2014.1 All Blom’s paintings are untitled, but for a numerical tag that situates each work in a timeline of his evolving practice. “Blom doesn’t want alphabetic language to determine how the work should be read, but for it to remain open to all kinds of audiences,”observed critic Nicola Trezzi of the painter’s strict desire to void his work of narrative.2 1. Zander Blom. (2014) Artists statement for 2014 exhibition New Paintings at Stevenson, Cape Town. http://archive.stevenson.info/ exhibitions/blom/index2014.html 2. Nicola Trezzi. (2016) ‘Bestial Modernity: The Art of Zander Blom’, in Paintings: Volume II 2013-16 . Cape Town: Stevenson.