Zander Blom & Sean O'Toole; South African 20th Century; The Bad Reviews
Provenance :
Exhibited : Felix Art Fair, Los Angeles, Stevenson Gallery, 2019.
Literature : Jori Finkel (2019) The New York Times, Frieze and Felix Turn Heads in Los Angeles, online, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/arts/design/frieze-la-felix-art-fairs.html, accessed 5 March 2024.
Notes : ′The Bad Reviews is an art-band project initiated by Zander Blom and myself in 2018. We released the album Eina! with Bad Paper in the same year, alongside the production of four videos and various banners. These banners, crafted in oil on canvas, were a collaborative effort between Zander and me and were intended to serve as props for a hypothetical tour. In 2019, Stevenson presented The Bad Reviews at Felix Art Fair in Los Angeles. The fair, held at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, allotted each gallery a single room, with The Bad Reviews invited to 'dress' Stevenson's allocated room. Zander travelled to Los Angeles to participate in the event. Notably, the present lot was exclusively painted by Zander to promote the fair. This particular piece was highlighted in a New York Times editorial about the event, alongside older banners created in 2018.′ - Sean O'Toole 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 mainly 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 anthology, Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting (2016). Blom's method is process-based and evolutionary, his canvases tending to progress through fixed series. 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. His use of impasto, gestural mark and pictorial structure, along with his exploitation of the oil paint's stain on unprimed Belgian linen, presents a distinctive painting style in South Africa. All of Blom's paintings are untitled, but for a numerical tag that situates each work in a timeline of his evolving practice. Represented by Stevenson, Blom has held 10 solo shows at the gallery (between 2010 and 2022), the latest of which runs from 12 August to 30 September 2023. Additionally, he has participated in numerous solo and group shows in South Africa, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Mauritius, and the USA. Sean O'Toole is writer, editor and curator based in Cape Town. He has authored two books, edited three volumes of essays and written extensively about art, photography and architecture for various print and online media. He is the founder of independent publisher Extemporary Press and a member of the experimental band The Bad Reviews with artist Zander Blom.
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