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.
David Goldblatt’s ‘Intersections’ is a major body of colour work produced between 2001 and 2011, marking a notable departure from the black-and-white photography that defined his earlier career. Motivated by the shifting political landscape of post-apartheid South Africa and new possibilities in digital printing, Goldblatt turned to colour to more fully capture the layered and often contradictory realities of the period. The series spans vast landscapes, urban and rural settings, monuments and subtle traces of human presence – subjects united by Goldblatt’s enduring concern with how political and moral values are inscribed in the physical world.
Five themes underpin the ‘Intersections’ series: the elusive presence of “fuck all” landscapes, the visual and symbolic function of fences and boundaries, the persistent histories of possession and dispossession, the quiet aftermath of mortality and memory in the era of HIV/AIDS, and an expanded awareness of photographic perspective. Travelling the country in a campervan, Goldblatt photographed open and often featureless terrain, scenes where human presence was marked not by people but by poles, fences or signage. In so doing, he captured the enduring effects of colonial and apartheid spatial planning, especially regarding land use and ownership. Increasingly, he acknowledged his own position in the act of seeing, presenting multiple viewpoints and inviting reflection on the role of the photographer. Together, these works form a nuanced and expansive visual inquiry into South Africa’s evolving landscapes of power, memory and meaning.
“In the 1990s my anger dissipated. Apartheid was no more. There were things to probe and criticise, but the emphasis was different. Lyricism seemed not only permissible but possible. In the late ‘90s I became aware of colour as a particular quality of this place and its light that I wanted to explore. It seemed ‘thin’, yet intense. To achieve prints that would hold these qualities I would need to print in colour in a way that was similar to that which I had developed for my black and white work … Over the generations, the land has shaped us - I say us in the broadest sense, us South Africans. And we have shaped the land. It is almost impossible now to find a pristine landscape. The grass has been grazed to the point of being threadbare, crops come and go, roads traverse, fences divide, and mines penetrate and throw up scabs of their detritus. These and our structures are the marks of our presence. I am drawn by the intimacies of our association with this land.” David Goldblatt
“In the 1990s my anger dissipated. Apartheid was no more. There were things to probe and criticise, but the emphasis was different. Lyricism seemed not only permissible but possible. In the late ‘90s I became aware of colour as a particular quality of this place and its light that I wanted to explore. It seemed ‘thin’, yet intense. To achieve prints that would hold these qualities I would need to print in colour in a way that was similar to that which I had developed for my black and white work … Over the generations, the land has shaped us - I say us in the broadest sense, us South Africans. And we have shaped the land. It is almost impossible now to find a pristine landscape. The grass has been grazed to the point of being threadbare, crops come and go, roads traverse, fences divide, and mines penetrate and throw up scabs of their detritus. These and our structures are the marks of our presence. I am drawn by the intimacies of our association with this land.” David Goldblatt
“In the 1990s my anger dissipated. Apartheid was no more. There were things to probe and criticise, but the emphasis was different. Lyricism seemed not only permissible but possible. In the late ‘90s I became aware of colour as a particular quality of this place and its light that I wanted to explore. It seemed ‘thin’, yet intense. To achieve prints that would hold these qualities I would need to print in colour in a way that was similar to that which I had developed for my black and white work … Over the generations, the land has shaped us - I say us in the broadest sense, us South Africans. And we have shaped the land. It is almost impossible now to find a pristine landscape. The grass has been grazed to the point of being threadbare, crops come and go, roads traverse, fences divide, and mines penetrate and throw up scabs of their detritus. These and our structures are the marks of our presence. I am drawn by the intimacies of our association with this land.” David Goldblatt
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.