Remembering, occupies all three of the KZNSA’s spaces and sees Clive van den Berg’s work return to the gallery since his first ever exhibition as a young artist. His show titled Monuments took place in the original NSA gallery in 1983. Not only is Remembering a return to where it all began but also a continuation of his deep exploration of memorializing.

Presented by the KZNSA in collaboration with Goodman Gallery the exhibition brings together works created between 2008 and 2021 in a visual elegy of sculpture, drawing and painting. Remembering features a survey of work by van den Berg that maps an arc of important and continuing thematic in the artist’s practice.

Primarily focusing on the past and present as contiguous elements, the actions of the past and its influence on issues at present, underpins the dominant themes in Remembering, manifesting as a reflection on biography and memory.

In Monuments in 1983 van den Berg began his exploration of memorialization as idea. The exhibition took on the form of large canvases shaped into blocklike structures that projected powerfully into the space. These structures were about “the inevitability of tragedy” describes the artist. They captured the presence and feeling of the ideologised monuments which informed their creation and recorded the tortures of society. In his continuing oeuvre van den Berg employs this idea while creating new meaning, assigning new tributes to these monoliths, shifting the focus of our social remembrance to memorialise current tragedies in the LGBTQIA community.

Remembering, comprising of 55 works, expands upon the aforementioned. Additionally, the overarching embodiment of landscape as a form of archive is seen throughout. African Landscape VI (Gold Below) forms a central and important work in the acknowledgment of this premise. Composed of two large panels of oil on canvas, each section revealing porous layers of land in altering notions. The colour fields of deep reds and yellows speak to that of an African landscape. The juxtaposition of this with the cooler marks described as indistinguishable ‘incidents’, create tension on the surface that speaks to the history of land as a whole. The smaller of the two panels, strategically positioned, revealing the idea of above and below ground. In his practice land becomes a site on which to record trauma, an archive through which the present must be considered.

The push and pull of colour and medium seen throughout the exhibition is a metaphor for time, going between the past and the present, to reflect on the idea of archiving and memorialising. The question – for who monuments are built – is assigned new meaning and the unresolved histories come to bear. The varying scale of the works affects the way the viewer embraces each piece, both physically and conceptually, encouraging active participation, an experiential moment in the space where we are invited to recall to memory the creation of a site of memoriam.

Curated by Kim Kandan and Jo Voysey in collaboration with Anthony Dawson and Neil Dundas of the Goodman Gallery.

For more information and for sales queries, please contact gallery@kznsagallery.co.za, or view the exhibition catalogue here.

Pictured:

African Landscape VI (Gold Below), 2020
Oil on canvas
Work: 280 x 280 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery (Cape Town, Johannesburg, London). Photo credit: Anthea Pokroy.