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 VI (Caldera)’, 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.

Clive van den Berg’s landscape paintings are not depictions of specific places, but conceptual terrains that make absence perceptible. His canvases move between the seen and the suppressed, drawing on the land as a porous vessel of memory, rupture, and longing. Through gestural brushwork and layered abstraction, Van den Berg explores the spaces where history lingers without resolution. The landscape, like the body, becomes a site that absorbs and holds what cannot be spoken – shaped by political trauma, ecological extraction, and personal memory.

In ‘Mirage I’, as in much of his work, Van den Berg navigates the threshold between presence and loss. His painterly language resists fixed meaning, instead proposing a map of what is felt rather than what is known. These imagined topographies suggest a constant interplay between past and present, where colour and texture evoke the sediment of time. The result is a visual space that invites reflection, allowing the viewer to encounter what has been buried, suppressed, or forgotten within the folds of the land.

‘Unsettled Air VIII’ continues Clive van den Berg’s exploration of the atmosphere as a repository for memory and emotion. In this series, the artist turns his gaze skyward, tracing the ephemeral qualities of air, vapour, and dust as metaphors for the unseen forces that shape our inner and outer worlds. The painting captures the tension between weight and weightlessness where clouds are tinted with the residue of the earth, and dust, once grounded, is swept into suspension. This act of transference becomes a gesture of remembrance, suggesting that what rises into the air carries with it the trace of what has been.

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.