Description

Evoking landscapes and the human body as sites of memory, van den Berg inserts queer perspectives into the larger rewriting of South African history

Zambia-born, South Africa-based artist Clive van den Berg (born 1956) produces a range of multimedia works unified by five themes: memory, light, landscape, desire and the body. Embodied in his lush paintings, mixed-media sculptures, delicate prints, films and public projects, these themes are bound up with the history of his native South Africa and its ongoing ramifications. For van den Berg, both the body and the landscape are sites that carry memories and scars, evoking desires which he aims to reveal in his work, often through the illuminating power of light. He has marked sites affected by Apartheid with human figures formed out of fire, and often depicts the body itself as a landscape, bearing the marks of AIDS. This catalog, accompanying an intercontinental touring exhibition from Johannesburg to London to Washington, DC, introduces van den Berg's political yet poignant work to the world.