In Clive van den Berg’s latest exhibition at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg, towering canvases span the full height and width of the gallery walls. These are not passive images—they require movement, shifts in perspective, and a bodily encounter with painting. Rooted in Van den Berg’s ongoing “African Landscapes” series, the works refuse the traditional view of land as static and unified. Instead, they challenge history, memory and how the body is implicated in how we understand space.
What may initially appear to be a landscape might morph into something cartographic, geological, or abstract—each element loaded with visual cues and cultural symbols. Colour and line become carriers of meaning, sometimes referring to underground minerals or colonial borders, other times evoking internal anatomy. The paintings are deeply literate, asking us to read them, to decipher their syntax. For Van den Berg, the landscape is not neutral territory—it is fragmented, porous, broken—like memory, like history, like the body.
