Clive van den BergLandscape Event X, 2023
The underground, both elusive and suggestive, has long served as a rich source of inquiry for Clive van den Berg, whose multidisciplinary practice explores the layered interplay between memory, landscape, and human experience. Working across media, Van den Berg seeks out narratives buried beneath the surface, drawing from personal history to examine the psychological, ideological, and physical terrains that continue to shape post-apartheid South Africa.
Van den Berg’s paintings of landscapes become sites of conceptual and material excavation. His visual language, marked by gestural brushwork and layered surfaces, moves between abstraction and allegory to create a kind of disrupted syntax that remains rich with suggestion. Works such as ‘Landscape Event X’ move beyond the visible terrain to evoke haunting absences and lingering psychological traces. The land is rendered porous, shaped by memory and unresolved experience.
