Clive van den Berg | Landscape Echoes | 2023
Goodman Gallery presents Landscape Echoes, an exhibition that delves into the evocative artistic practice of Clive van den Berg whose work deftly weaves together themes of landscape, absence, and echoes. In this show the artist offers a gestural and intuitive application of paint to these thematic explorations, letting the paint have greater direction in the visual composition and emotive capabilities of each work.
Van den Berg continues to reflect on his own complex relationship to landscape with this show providing a body of work that communicates a more visceral articulation of this engagement. This is embedded in the quality of the paint as much as the construction of the paintings and the abstract imagery that emerges on the canvas.
Drawing upon his distinctive visual language of gestural brushstrokes, Van den Berg’s paintings explore the porous nature of land as a receptacle for lived experience, unearthing what lies unresolved beneath its surface. In this exhibition, the landscapes serve as a departure point, transcending their physicality to evoke a haunting absence that resonates within the viewer’s consciousness. In this way, the works, with multiple modes of painting present, operate as a series of maps that guide viewers through imagined topographies and merged temporalities.
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About
Clive van den Berg
Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Zambia) is an artist, curator and designer, who works on his own and in collaboration with colleagues in a collective called trace, whose primary activities are the development of public projects. He has had several solo exhibitions in South Africa, and his work is regularly exhibited abroad. His public projects have included the artworks for landmark Northern Cape Legislature and, since he has joined the trace team, museum projects for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Constitution Hill, Freedom Park, the Workers Museum, The Holocaust and Genocide Centre and many other projects.
Van den Berg has much experience working on large-scale institutional projects with teams representing diverse constituencies: urban planners and policy makers, architects, landscape designers, museum curators, historians, community liaison officials and representatives of local and national governments. In the Northern Cape, for example, where he worked with the Luis Ferreira da Silva architects, he pioneered a new strategy for integrating forms of the local landscape and indigenous aesthetics into the overall building design, while also training local artisans as part of a skills transference project aimed at long-term sustainability. The result is a world-renowned and uniquely South African state edifice: a monument to the people of the Northern Cape.
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