Clive van den Berg

In Soundings, In Passage – a solo exhibition of recent work at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg – Clive van den Berg explores new as well as familiar terrain. Characteristically, he is not bound by medium, presenting monoprints, paintings, as well as a large-scale sculpture. Many of these works – both physically and conceptually – are the result of time spent in the United States, where van den Berg was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research fellowship, and worked at the LeRoy Neimen Center for Print Studies while on a residency at Columbia University in New York City.

In the catalogue Clive van den Berg: Unlearning the Grounds of Art (published by Goodman Gallery on the occasion of Soundings, in Passage), Rosalind C. Morris refers to Clive van den Berg’s insistence “that he is seeking a new kind of language, that he is attempting to break syntax without relinquishing its necessity." Morris continues to to explain that the "enormous range of works, the multiplicity of media, the vacillation between saturated colour and simple lines in monochromatic prints, the darting between allegory and abstraction: these tensions and polarities arrest and then excite the viewer, who encounters in the artist’s abundant new offerings the residue of earlier concerns but, equally, the determined departure from them. The title of the 2011 show gives voice to that mobility, and suggests an exploratory moment. But with its improbable invocation of the practice of maritime measurement (in relation to an corpus that is primarily concerned with the earth, the underground, and the landscape of a landlocked city, Johannesburg), we are alerted to the fact that this exploration requires something more than the well-trained eye. We must find our way, or plumb the depths, feelingly. Not with sentiment, but with a kind of heightening of the senses, and, more importantly, a re-oriented vision.”

Clive van den Berg is based in Johannesburg, South Africa and was born in Zambia in 1956. He is an artist working in various disciplines. Besides his studio practice he devotes much time to the curation and design of heritage projects, sometimes on his own and sometimes through trace, a company comprising professionals from different disciplines, including architects, historians, writers and artists. They design, research and curate exhibitions, public art projects and museum developments. Many of these are projects of redress, activating reflection on the past and future envisioning. These include The Worker’s Museum and Women’s Gaol in Johannesburg and he is currently working on the exhibit design for Freedom Park in Pretoria. His art has been shown around the world – in South Africa, Berlin, Charleroi, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, New York, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, London and Stockholm. It has also earned him several major prizes, including, internationally, a Civitella Ranieri fellowship and a Smithsonian Artist Research fellowship.

Clive van den Berg has forged a distinguished career as an artist, curator, designer, lecturer and cultural activist. He is known as much for his intelligence and lively wit as he is for his extraordinary craftsmanship in painting, sculpture, printmaking and in film. Most recently he was Curator of Spier Contemporary (2007) and is currently the Curator/Designer of The Workers Museum, Newtown, Johannesburg and of several public projects in Sharpeville, Soweto and at Freedom Park, Pretoria. Van den Berg is represented in major public collections including Iziko South African National Gallery.

Visual and verbal languages with which to explore the possibilities of being other are central to Van den Berg’s work. His current exhibition departs from convention, challenges assumptions about media, expresses concerns about the state of art and of nation and explores anxieties about the fate of a ravaged planet. But Van den Berg’s strength lies, above all, in his assertions of the possibilities of being otherwise in order to make opportunities for transformation without forgetfulness.

This March, Goodman Gallery Cape presents a group exhibition of work in a wide range of media. Titled Editions, the show brings together photographs, sculpture, video/multimedia works, lithographs, linocuts and photogravures by a variety of South African and international artists, with the common thread that each work forms part of an edition.

Kudzanai Chiurai shows a new film from his Conflict Resolution series, last seen at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, as well as a new photograph from the same body of work. New prints by Gerhard Marx and Walter Oltmann find them engaging with etching, lithography and woodblock printing in new and exciting ways.

Alfredo Jaar’s photographs of Serra Pelada, an opencast gold mine dug by human hands in Brazil, are shown as color transparencies mounted in lightboxes, and sit in uneasy relation to Liza Lou’s Gather Forty, a sculpture made from gold-plated beads threaded and bound in a sheaf.

The exhibition also includes new prints by Clive van den Berg and Diane Victor; photographs from Candice Breitz’ recent Extra!, last seen at the Iziko South African National Gallery, and David Goldblatt’s characteristically quiet colour landscapes; and a portfolio of photolithography by Moshekwa Langa.

Also on show is the full series of Robert Hodgins’ experimental Officers and Gents, to coincide with the Wits Art Museum’s exhibition of his print archive; a selection of lithographs from Sam Nhlengethwa’s recent Conversations series; Mikhael Subotzky’s Don’t even think of it, a film made from a series of still photographs shot by the artist in 2004; and a set of 7 photogravures by William Kentridge titled Zeno Writing II.

This March, Goodman Gallery Cape presents a group exhibition of work in a wide range of media. Titled Editions, the show brings together photographs, sculpture, video/multimedia works, lithographs, linocuts and photogravures by a variety of South African and international artists, with the common thread that each work forms part of an edition.

Kudzanai Chiurai shows a new film from his Conflict Resolution series, last seen at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, as well as a new photograph from the same body of work. New prints by Gerhard Marx and Walter Oltmann find them engaging with etching, lithography and woodblock printing in new and exciting ways.

Alfredo Jaar’s photographs of Serra Pelada, an opencast gold mine dug by human hands in Brazil, are shown as color transparencies mounted in lightboxes, and sit in uneasy relation to Liza Lou’s Gather Forty, a sculpture made from gold-plated beads threaded and bound in a sheaf.

The exhibition also includes new prints by Clive van den Berg and Diane Victor; photographs from Candice Breitz’ recent Extra!, last seen at the Iziko South African National Gallery, and David Goldblatt’s characteristically quiet colour landscapes; and a portfolio of photolithography by Moshekwa Langa.

Also on show is the full series of Robert Hodgins’ experimental Officers and Gents, to coincide with the Wits Art Museum’s exhibition of his print archive; a selection of lithographs from Sam Nhlengethwa’s recent Conversations series; Mikhael Subotzky’s Don’t even think of it, a film made from a series of still photographs shot by the artist in 2004; and a set of 7 photogravures by William Kentridge titled Zeno Writing II.

Goodman Gallery Cape presents Summer Show – opening on 15 December and running until 14 January. The exhibition has been designed as a review, focusing on new and recent work by South Africans artists either represented by or associated with the gallery. Important works from series produced by the artists over the past year are showcased, and the show also features a selection of works recently shown at the gallery’s Johannesburg spaces.

The exhibition includes prints from Siemon Allen‘s Records series, in which the artist explores images of South Africa through the collection and archiving of music records from the beginning of the 20th Century to the present day. Photography is strongly represented, with works from Jodi Bieber’s vibrant, urban-denizen take in her Soweto series, in marked contrast with David Goldblatt’s large-scale colour prints of rural South Africa. Mikhael Subotzky (who recently won the 2012 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art) and Patrick Waterhouse show recent work from their ongoing collaboration on the Ponte City project.

A text piece by Stuart Bird is shown in anticipation of his upcoming solo show in January, Gerhard Marx presents exquisitely detailed and artisanally worked surfaces in his new works, continuing his preoccupation with notions of mapping, place and nature, and Walter Oltmann shows a powerful new addition in aluminium wire to his series of insect suit sculptures.

Paintings by Moshekwa Langa, Lisa Brice and Clive van den Berg explore abstraction and gesture in different ways; all three have produced significant bodies of new works which were well received during 2011. Minnette Vari‘s uncanny brush and ink drawings of the goddess/crone Baubo sit in awkward dialogue with Kendell Geers’ La Sainte Vierge.

This exhibition affords a fascinating look at the output of some of South Africa’s major artists, and will also showcase from our Johannesburg spaces works not yet shown in Cape Town, including Kudzanai Chiurai’s Revelations, a series of photographic tableaux exploring politics and power in Africa, new wood sculptures by Willem Boshoff, and a selection of drawings, linocut graphics and sculpture by William Kentridge.

This winter the Goodman Gallery will relaunch its Parkwood space, which has been extensively reconsidered, both physically and conceptually. This launch will be initiated with a group exhibition simply titled Winter Show, featuring a range of luminary-status local and international artists. The show will not only present recent works by Goodman stalwarts such as William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Sam Nhlengethwa and Mikhael Subotzky, but will also reveal a shift in the Gallery’s approach, showcasing work from around the Continent and beyond that is both explicitly and implicitly concerned with synergies and tensions between Africa and the rest of the globe. Some of the participating international artists, such as Ghada Amer and Hank Willis Thomas, are not only being showcased by the Goodman Gallery, but are now officially represented by us.

The Winter Show will act as a confluence of the Goodman Gallery’s top represented artists, as well as artists participating in In Context – a series of exhibitions and interventions currently taking place at Arts on Main and other venues in Johannesburg. Artists such as Jenny Holzer, Amer, Willis Thomas, Bili Bidjocka, Willem Boshoff and Kara Walker will participate in both shows, with the Winter Show presenting some of their more recent work. While In Context manifests an intimate and often candid exploration of the dynamics of the African continent, the Winter Show will offer a broader conceptual platform, covering many aspects of South African, African and global landscapes and conditions.

The Winter Show will elaborate on the thorny notion of the politics of representation, which Brenda Atkinson and Candice Breitz confronted in their 1999 collection of essays Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art. The book was a direct response to the critique of Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, who was the creative director of the Second Johannesburg Biennial in 1997. At the time, Enwezor interrogated the practice of artists such as Breitz, Minnette Vári and Penny Siopis, intricately considering the question of ‘who has the right to represent whom?’ Now, over a decade later, accusations of misrepresentation have been revisited and reconsidered not only by Enwezor himself and those whose essays were included in Grey Areas, but by the art community at large. In Context magnifies these issues, while the Winter Show augments the dialogue, bringing new voices into the conversation.

Compelling features of the Winter Show include two of Walker’s 2009 films – which are based on narratives from archives of a bureau established in 1865 to assist African Americans with the transition from slavery to freedom – presenting the artist’s signature black-silhouette cut-out figures, which almost impossibly convey the complexities of race, gender, sexuality and power in their stilted and provocative movements. Jenny Holzer’s Purple Red Curve (2005) transmits a coalescence of master narratives through a curved electronic LED sign. Jeremy Wafer will create a site-specific wall drawing in the Goodman Gallery specifically for the show. Kentridge will present a series of new drawings produced this year as well as a maquette of the structure World on its Hind Legs, created in collaboration with Gerhard Marx. A large scale, steel version of this work will be launched at the Apartheid Museum on 8 July 2010 as part of In Context. The Winter Show will also feature an ongoing screening of all of the Goodman Gallery’s top art films by leading artists such as Kentridge and Vári.

The Goodman Gallery in Parkwood has undergone numerous physical transformations and now boasts a new showroom and a space dedicated to photographic works. We are in the process of establishing an art library accessible to the visiting public and will offer a range of educational art talks and events during the Winter Show.

With Goodman Gallery firmly established as a prestigious, world-class contemporary art institution, the Winter Show will reveal how the Gallery – beyond representing artists of the highest caliber – is dedicated to bringing an innovative programme of relevant and compelling international works to South Africa, offering audiences exposure to some of the best contemporary work being produced locally and abroad.