Clive van den BergAfrican Landscape XIV, 2021
Clive van den Berg’s gestural painting practice transforms landscape into a charged site of emotional and historical excavation. With an intuitive command of mark-making and a sensitivity to surface, he renders the land as a porous and unstable vessel – one that holds memory, trauma, and lived experience within its folds. Rather than depict recognisable geography, Van den Berg creates abstracted terrains that resist fixed meaning. The layered forms and shifting chromatic fields suggest topographies shaped by what lies beneath the surface, inviting viewers into a space where presence and absence co-exist.
With his paintings, Van den Berg considers how history settles into landscape, how physical sites become repositories of collective memory, and how those memories can be reawakened through the language of painting. His works reveal the land not as an active participant in processes of rupture, remembrance, and renewal. The landscapes, fragmented and fluid, speak to the entanglements of identity and the endurance of memory across generations. In tracing gestures that evoke both geological strata and psychic scars, van den Berg offers a meditation on the interwoven nature of past and present by confronting what has been buried.
