Clive van den BergLandscape Event XIII, 2023
Clive van den Berg is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, printmaking, film, and public art. Drawing from the layered history of South Africa, his work explores the interrelation of memory, landscape, and the body. Through abstracted, imagined terrains, Van den Berg disrupts conventional artistic syntax, shifting between allegory and abstraction to examine how the land holds and reveals personal and political anxieties. His landscapes do not depict geography as static, but rather as fluid sites of entanglement, shaped by trauma, ideology, and time.
Raised in a Zambian mining town, Van den Berg’s early experiences shaped a deep awareness of the subterranean – what he refers to as the "underscape" – a hidden world beneath the surface that mirrors human intervention and historical extraction. This perspective continues to inform his visual language, particularly in works like ‘Landscape Event XIII’, where geological structures are reimagined through painterly gestures influenced by Ground Penetrating Radar and mining imagery. By peeling back the layers of the earth, Van den Berg transforms landscape into a space of inquiry, where absence, memory, and transformation converge.
