Clive van den BergShards of Sky, 2016
‘Shards of Sky’ continues Clive van den Berg’s enduring exploration of landscape as both a container of memory and a stage for emotional and political unease. In this painting, fractured fields of colour and suspended forms evoke a world in flux – where the sky itself appears splintered, unstable, and laden with tension. Through gestural brushwork and layered surfaces, Van den Berg gestures toward the unseen forces that shape our surroundings: the buried histories, ruptures, and longings that resist full resolution.
Rather than offering a cohesive image of place, Shards of Sky unravels the very notion of land and sky as fixed entities. In Van den Berg’s vision, landscape is porous and charged, marked as much by what lies beneath as what appears above. As with many of Van den Berg’s paintings, the work oscillates between allegory and abstraction, reflecting a desire to forge new forms of seeing and understanding.
