CLIVE VAN DEN BERG

Van den Berg has long viewed landscape as a terrain shaped by the past and its echoes. He approaches land not as a neutral expanse but as a repository of lived experience, marked by what has occurred, what has been forgotten, and what lingers unresolved. In Remnant, he deepens this enquiry through surfaces animated by sweeping gestures, shifts of colour and textured passages that gather and fall away. Paint functions as a means of sensing rather than illustrating, allowing forms to emerge through an interplay of intuition, atmosphere and memory.

A recurring idea within Van den Berg’s practice is that of ‘fugitive marks’, the lingering traces of past events embedded within the land. These subtle prompts, whether a rise in the earth or a scatter of stones, drift between recognition and obscurity. Rather than reconstructing fixed narratives, the artist responds to such vestiges with a visual language that moves between abstraction and allegory, permitting the unresolved nature of the past to remain open.