CLIVE VAN DEN BERG

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.’