Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Zambia) is a Johannesburg-based artist, curator and designer. Working across various mediums throughout the course of his prolific forty-year career, which has focused on pioneering the insertion of queer perspectives into the larger rewrite of South African history, Van den Berg has produced a range of works unified by his enduring focus on five interrelated themes: memory, light, landscape, desire and body.

Landscape Horizon V and Landscape Marked I continue Van den Berg’s engagement with the idea of the land as a porous receptacle for lived experience. In these works the artist continues to reflect on his own complex relationship to landscape with this body of work communicating 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.

With ‘Aquifer II (Flow)’, Clive van den Berg continues his long-standing exploration of the underground as both a physical and psychological site. Rooted in personal memory yet reaching into the broader terrain of South African history, the work evokes an unseen world shaped by excavation, displacement, and forgetting. The aquifer, in this context, becomes a potent metaphor for the submerged narratives that lie beneath the surface – those shaped by personal inheritance, colonial extraction, and ecological disregard.

‘Aquifer II (Flow)’ is not a literal rendering of the landscape, but a cartography of submerged histories and emotional intensities. The work channels the artist’s interest in what is concealed – geological, ideological, or emotional. Through abstraction, Van den Berg resists traditional pictorial language, allowing instead for rupture, seepage, and uncertainty. Each mark, each shifting field of colour, gestures toward forgotten bodies, silenced geographies, and the ethical questions that linger in the aftermath of extraction. The result is a surface that holds memory like sediment, layered and unresolved. Here, painting becomes a form of excavation, and the canvas a site through which personal and political pasts flow into the present.

The underground, both elusive and suggestive, has long served as a rich source of inquiry for Clive van den Berg, whose multidisciplinary practice explores the layered interplay between memory, landscape, and human experience. Working across media, Van den Berg seeks out narratives buried beneath the surface, drawing from personal history to examine the psychological, ideological, and physical terrains that continue to shape post-apartheid South Africa.

Van den Berg’s paintings of landscapes become sites of conceptual and material excavation. His visual language, marked by gestural brushwork and layered surfaces, moves between abstraction and allegory to create a kind of disrupted syntax that remains rich with suggestion. Works such as ‘Landscape Event X’ move beyond the visible terrain to evoke haunting absences and lingering psychological traces. The land is rendered porous, shaped by memory and unresolved experience.