Born in 1971, Iris van Zanten has spent her life immersed in the nuances of visual language. Her academic journey began at the Academy of Visual Arts in Amsterdam, where she graduated in 1996, and deepened with a Master’s degree in Art History from the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. This dual grounding in practice and theory shaped her into a painter who navigates both the physical and symbolic dimensions of image-making with remarkable sensitivity.
From the earliest stages of her career, Iris has pursued a fundamental question: how can the core of a story be captured through visual form? Her practice is an ongoing investigation into which gestures, expressions, and attributes can best carry the emotional and psychological weight of human experience. Rather than seeking fixed answers, she embraces the evolving nature of this inquiry, allowing themes to resurface, transform, and reemerge in new visual iterations.
Process as a Path to Discovery
Van Zanten’s creative process is marked by a willingness to let each piece unfold according to its own rhythm. She delights in the discovery of new images within recurring themes, treating repetition not as redundancy but as a rich field for variation and deepening. Life drawing plays a crucial role in this process. The human figure, with its ever-changing lines, forms, and moods, acts as a touchstone for her work—fueling compositions that balance immediacy with reflection.
To bring depth and tactility to her paintings, Iris developed a unique technique that evokes the faded richness of ancient frescoes. By combining sand, bone glue, and Van Dyck Brown-prepared surfaces, she creates a ground that is both fragile and enduring. Over this, she applies layers of pigments, ink, and acrylic, building atmospheric compositions that seem to float between presence and memory. The result is a visual language that feels both grounded in materiality and open to interpretation.
Combs and Pencils (2025): Art as a Mirror to History
In her 2025 work Combs and Pencils, Iris van Zanten turns her painterly voice toward a powerful and painful chapter in history. At first glance, the title may evoke something mundane—objects from a desk or dressing table—but within the context of the work, these everyday tools become instruments of injustice and classification.
The painting draws from a chilling reality: the pencil and comb test used during apartheid in South Africa as a method of racial categorization. Authorities would pass a pencil or comb through an individual’s hair. If it slid through easily, the person might be classified as “white.” If the pencil caught or the comb snagged, the person could be labeled “colored” or “black”—categories that dictated not only identity but access to fundamental rights, opportunities, and dignity.
Van Zanten’s rendering of this subject is neither overtly didactic nor emotionally distanced. Instead, she employs her signature layering technique to create a textured surface that mirrors the complexity of memory and trauma. The materials—pigments, acrylic, and ink on wood—add a sense of permanence to the work, contrasting with the ephemeral and arbitrary nature of the test it depicts. Sand and bone glue—traditionally associated with preservation and binding—here underscore the haunting permanence of imposed identity.
Visual Language and Ethical Reflection
The strength of Combs and Pencils lies in how it communicates the violence of categorization without resorting to graphic representation. There are no figures in chains, no judges or courts—only the objects themselves, charged with implication. This restraint is part of van Zanten’s power as an artist. She trusts the viewer to bring their own historical and emotional understanding to the image, creating space for contemplation rather than dictating a response.
Her use of subdued earth tones—rich browns, ochres, and muted blacks—connects the work both visually and thematically to the ground, the body, and the legacy of colonial violence. The comb and pencil, rendered with quiet clarity, float within a soft, atmospheric space, almost ghostlike in their presence. This ambiguity invites questions: What is being measured? Who decides the terms of belonging? And what remains unspoken in the spaces between lines and layers?
Memory, Material, and Moral Weight
By embedding historical critique within the physical texture of her painting, van Zanten allows the past to live not just in narrative but in substance. The sand adds grit and imperfection, the bone glue recalls both fragility and preservation, and the Van Dyck Brown ground gives the image an aged, archival feel. These are not just aesthetic choices; they are ethical ones, anchoring the work in a conscious engagement with material history.
Van Zanten’s approach aligns with a growing movement in contemporary art that seeks to address systemic injustice through subtle, materially informed practices. Rather than presenting a spectacle of suffering, she invites viewers into a quieter, more sustained reflection—one that asks not only what happened, but how we remember, process, and ultimately carry forward the lessons of such histories.
Conclusion: A Painter of Depth and Conscience
Iris van Zanten’s artistic practice is distinguished by its commitment to both beauty and meaning. Her ability to fuse technical innovation with emotional and intellectual depth places her among the most thoughtful artists working today. In Combs and Pencils, she demonstrates how painting can act as a vessel for ethical inquiry—transforming simple objects into symbols that resonate across time, geography, and identity.
As themes of racial justice and historical reckoning continue to shape global discourse, works like Combs and Pencils remind us of art’s unique capacity to speak across silence, to honor complexity, and to confront painful truths with grace. Van Zanten’s art does not offer closure. Instead, it opens doors—into history, into memory, and into ourselves.
