Clive van den Berg Dossier 2024

Excavations
From 18 January 2024
Goodman Gallery New York

Excavations places work by South African artists Clive van den Berg and the late David Goldblatt in conversation to encourage a deeper understanding of the intricate connections between the land and its structures as well as the emotional resonance of ideologies embedded within the South African terrain.

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Landscape Echoes
10 August - 15 September 2023
Goodman Gallery, Cape Town

Goodman Gallery presents Landscape Echoes, an exhibition that delves into the evocative artistic practice of Clive van den Berg whose work deftly weaves together themes of landscape, absence, and echoes. In this show the artist offers a gestural and intuitive application of paint to these thematic explorations, letting the paint have greater direction in the visual composition and emotive capabilities of each work.

Van den Berg continues to reflect on his own complex relationship to landscape with this show providing a body of work that communicates a more visceral articulation of this engagement.

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Drawing upon his distinctive visual language of gestural brushstrokes, Van den Berg’s paintings explore the porous nature of land as a receptacle for lived experience, unearthing what lies unresolved beneath its surface. In this exhibition, the landscapes serve as a departure point, transcending their physicality to evoke a haunting absence that resonates within the viewer’s consciousness. In this way, the works, with multiple modes of painting present, operate as a series of maps that guide viewers through imagined topographies and merged temporalities. 

Fugitive Marks
16 March - 23 April 2022
Goodman Gallery, London

Goodman Gallery presents Fugitive Marks, Clive van den Berg’s first solo exhibition in London, in which the artist uses landscape painting as a vehicle with which to unearth suppressed narratives. Van den Berg’s 40-year practice has formed part of a small movement of artists pioneering the insertion of queer perspectives into the larger rewrite of South African history. Throughout his practice, the artist has engaged with the idea of the land as a porous receptacle for lived experience. This presentation of new large-scale paintings considers the body and the land as loaded sites which carry memories and scars.

The South African artist’s distinct visual language moves between allegory and abstraction as Van den Berg excavates what exists – unresolved – below the surface. For this exhibition, he returns to the concept of ‘fugitive marks’ which he defines as ‘ghosts from the past co-existing with human beings in the present’.

In this vein, a swelling of earth or a pile of stones that once marked a grave or battle site make up the grammar of his landscape vocabulary: ‘these vestigial mutterings of geography are prompts that I respond to in my work, connecting the remnant to its repressed or forgotten source.’

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Underscape
20 November - 15 January 2022
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

Following Clive Van den Berg’s recent survey at the KwaZulu Natal Society of Arts, Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Underscape, a cross-section of paintings by the artist that considers the “distemper” of our lived experience in relation to landscape.

On the nature of this theme in his work, Van den Berg notes:

“A swelling of earth, a hollow or dispersed pile of stones that once marked a grave or embattlement, are the grammar of my landscape vocabulary. These vestigial mutterings of geography are the prompts that I respond to in making my work, a kind of interstitial speech, connecting the remnant to its repressed or forgotten source… I grew up in Luanshya, a small mining town in Zambia and now live in Johannesburg, one of the largest of all mining towns. Perhaps it is the occasional shaking of the land, its stuttering as a shaft collapses or a plate realigns, or indeed the sudden appearance of sinkholes, those most compelling of negative spaces that first made me curious about that other landscape, the underscape.”

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For Van den Berg, land serves as a powerful marker for the anxieties contained in both the personal and the political. The artist seeks to unpack this by separating the idea of land into the spheres of ‘above’ and ‘below’ ground. Using this dichotomy the artist is able to differentiate between what we idealise on the surface, and what exists unresolved below. Historical depictions of land, which were primarily filtered through Western perception, sought to possess the territory by recording its surface image. In turn, Van den Berg confronts the tradition of South African landscape painting, by peeling “the surface off the land and mak[ing] the landscapes porous”.

Van den Berg sees the body and the landscape as sites that carry memories and scars. In turn, these symbols evoke desires, which the artist aims to reveal, often through the illuminating power of light. Van den Berg does this by presenting a new kind of visual language, one that attempts to break syntax without relinquishing its necessity. In this sense, the artist darts between allegory and abstraction in his works, creating tensions and polarities that simultaneously arrest and excite the viewer when encountering them.

The Sunday Times – Clive van den Berg’s latest show shakes up our notion of landscape art
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In Conversation | Clive van den Berg & Matthew Krouse