Clive van den Berg

The long and prolific career of Clive van den Berg, artist, curator, designer, writer and activist

Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Zambia) - artist, curator, designer, writer and activist - has been working across mediums throughout the course of his prolific career. He produces a range of works unified by his enduring focus on five interrelated 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 intricately bound up with the history of his native South Africa and its ongoing ramifications. 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.

For van den Berg, both the body and the landscape are sites that carry memories and scars and that evoke desires, which he aims to reveal in his work, often through the illuminating power of light. As a visual artist, he is interested in both formal beauty and conceptual depth. His extensive body of work ranges in size and format, and includes paintings, prints, multi-media sculpture, landscape installation, and videography.