Clive van den Berg | Fugitive Marks
Goodman Gallery London
16 March - 23 April 2022
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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.’
Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Zambia) is a Johannesburg-based artist, curator and designer.
In addition to his studio practice, which has focussed on the subjects of land and love, he has worked extensively on large-scale public projects that seek to serve as a bridge between the difficulties of the past and the possibilities of the future.
Most notably, this includes a monument to the people of the Northern Cape where Van den Berg pioneered a new strategy for integrating forms of the landscape and indigenous aesthetics into the building design. Van den Berg has also worked on major museum projects within postapartheid South Africa, including the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Constitution Hill, Freedom Park, the Workers Museum and The Holocaust and Genocide Centre.
In 2012, Van den Berg completed a large-scale mosaic commission for the Spier Art Trust / Nando’s Art Collection in London, titled Coming to the City.
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