Clive van den Berg’s sculptural practice emerges from a sustained inquiry into how histories are inscribed on the body and how those inscriptions can be made visible through form. Over the past four decades, Van den Berg has developed a deeply considered body of work that places memory, desire, light, and the politics of visibility at its core. In his sculptures, the body becomes a site of vulnerability and presence – its surface magnified to expose the quiet force of emotion, intimacy, and endurance in the face of social erasure. His works often reflect on the impact of the AIDS crisis and its ongoing resonance within queer experience, offering forms of remembrance and resistance that speak to both personal loss and collective resilience.

Through carved gestures and restrained symbolism, Van den Berg addresses the entanglement of identity and mortality, inviting viewers to consider how tenderness and attentiveness might function as political acts. His sculptures do not offer resolution, but rather hold space for mourning, memory, and ethical reflection.

‘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.