PRESS RELEASE
ZANDER BLOM
Feb 5 – Feb 25, 2026
ZANDER BLOM
Everard Read is delighted to welcome Zander Blom to the gallery.
Blom requires little introduction, having established himself over the past two decades as a significant and influential presence within the South African art landscape. His practice has often been characterised as irreverent, marked by a sustained interrogation of historical art conventions and inherited modes of painting. Yet this apparent restlessness belies a rigorously informed and intellectually grounded approach to artistic production, one that consistently engages the productive tension between established dogma and creative indeterminacy.
Blom’s practice may be understood as a navigation toward a personal artistic lodestar, shaped simultaneously by an acknowledgement of a lineage of antecedents and a deliberate refusal of predetermined outcomes. At moments when resolution appears imminent, he redirects his enquiry, discarding rehearsed gestures in favour of renewed experimentation, thereby opening painting onto previously unexplored formal and conceptual possibilities. In this way, his work occupies a critical space between a fidelity to the painterly impulse and resistance to repetition.
In an essay reflecting on the production of several works presented here, Blom articulates a conception of painting as a site of heightened reflexivity: his is an elastic and restless consciousness engaged in dialogue with itself, with the canvas functioning as an alter ego that demands continual recalibration. The seemingly minor addition or removal of paint becomes a decisive act, capable of producing either equilibrium or productive dissonance. Comparable to a poet’s strategic arrangement of language, Blom’s orchestration of colour and form pursues affective intensity and the sublime. With this balance achieved, the viewer encounters an experience that is at once disquieting and compelling, and often deeply satisfying.
A distilled selection of works from the artist’s collection, spanning the past decade, will be on view throughout the month of February.
