Description

A monolith is defined as a single, large, unified structure. An apt name for the first complete monograph on the work of Dutch painter Robert Zandvliet (b. 1970). This monumental volume reveals the ongoing tension between experimentation and striking consistency in his body of work.

Spanning more than thirty years (1994–2025), MONOLITH brings together Zandvliet's work from from early explorations to the mature, series-based thinking that defines his practice today. At the centre of the book, curator and art critic Andreas Fiedler constructs a visual essay that draws freely across periods and motifs. It functions as an ‘exhibition on paper’ and offers a new, non-linear reading of his oeuvre. Art historian Esther Darley introduces each major series (2008–2025), clarifying the questions, methods, and pictorial strategies behind Zandvliet’s sustained investigations into landscape, colour, art history, gesture, and all-over structure. Philosopher Jan Bor contributes a reflective essay on perception and painting, written in dialogue with works from different decades, while art historian Gudrun Knaus provides an intimate account of Zandvliet’s monotype residency at Niels Borch Jensen in Copenhagen.

In a final monologue, Robert Zandvliet traces how his most recent series Paradaidha absorbs and transforms everything that came before—where motifs once isolated now converge into a single, layered field. Designed by Mainstudio as a tactile, sculptural object, MONOLITH is not simply a survey, but an autonomous work in itself: a book that invites repeated opening, close looking, and discovery.