Holly Zandbergen
For Holly Zandbergen, painting is a dance between feeling and form—a quiet choreography of thought made visible through gesture. Her canvases pulse with frenetic energy, each mark charged with presence and intention. On closer inspection, this vitality reveals itself not as chaos, but as clarity—an articulation of the artist’s inner world rendered through movement, texture, and touch.
Based in Christchurch, Holly approaches painting as a personal and exploratory act, a way of coming to know her subject—whether that subject is an echo of internal emotion or a subject drawn from the external world. Her ongoing series, which include expressive renderings of florals, lush gardens, and the majestic forms of Aoraki / Mount Cook, reflect this fluid relationship between inner response and outward form. These recurring motifs become vessels for emotional and atmospheric states—symbols of growth, memory, reverence, and wonder. Using oil paint as her chosen medium, Holly embraces its ability to hold time, weight, and nuance. Though her practice remains grounded in figuration, her inspiration is largely intuitive and internally driven. This manifests in her impasto application, where variations in speed, pressure, and motion open up a terrain of expressive possibility. The act of painting becomes a meditation on presence—both the psychological space she enters before making a mark and the tactile moment of palette knife meeting canvas. |
Holly Zandbergen explores the natural world through an expressionist lens, creating impasto-rich canvases that pulse with colour, texture, and emotional intensity |