Clive van den Berg’s artistic practice is centered around two main themes, land and love. 

The surface of land and the surface of skin have occupied many artists, so much so that landscape and figurative painting are core terms in our lexicon. What makes van den Berg’s practice distinct is his interest in the porous – porous skin and porous land. 

He became acutely aware of the permeability of skin in the 1980s with the identification of the HIV virus. “From that time I began to re-imagine my body as a porous thing, vulnerable to an invisible and incomprehensible threat. It was a medieval moment. Modernism had ruptured, medicine meant nothing and the words gay and plague, were joined. And yet we found ways to love, knowingly, in the face of accumulating threats to our health and identity”. 

Van den Berg’s paintings and sculptures have explored the enduringly uneasy relationship between the familiar above ground landscape and the less familiar below ground landscape – the underneath, the realm of geology, mining, burial, and the repressed. He has forged a unique pictorial language that allows the present and past to meet, repressed memory to have voice and the underneath to be given image.