Zander Blom

Zander Blom is a Johannesburg-based artist who utilizes painting, drawing, sculpture, and, crucially, photography, to interrogate received ideas about creative endeavour and Modernism in Africa. Typically, Blom creates modular units of mark, shape and form in paint, printmaking and assemblage, which are configured, photographed, reconfigured and photographed again. These photographs are always staged in Blom's shabbily chic Brixton home, usually in the corners between the pressed ceiling and the white walls.

Blom's exhibited work seems to span the full gambit of his process: finished product photographs are exhibited alongside the printed or made shapes, as well as with piles of detritus that presumably echo those around his studio/home.

The visual elements of Blom's painted, drawn and printed images are undeniably slick: robust black dominates, and shapes are razor-sharp as if machined. Targets, blocks and rectangles are replicated, becoming base units in visual constructions. The constructed-ness of the whole is signalled by the iconic nature of its parts. Even the ragged, irregular shards of black that emanate from the centres of certain groups have a crispness that marks them as unmistakably Blom images.

Zander Blom is represented by Rooke Gallery in Johannesburg and WHATIFTHEWORLD/GALELRY in Cape Town.

Exhibitions:
Hypocrite's Lament & The Drain of Progress