Notes

Artist's Bio

Clive van den Berg (b. 1956, Zambia) is a Johannesburg-based artist, curator and designer. In addition to his studio practice, which has focused on the subjects of land and love, he has worked extensively on large-scale public projects that seek to serve as a bridge between the difficulties of the past and the possibilities of the future. Most notably, this includes a monument to the people of the Northern Cape where van den Berg pioneered a new strategy for integrating forms of the landscape and indigenous aesthetics into the building design. Van den Berg has also worked on major museum projects within post-apartheid South Africa, including the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Constitution Hill, Freedom Park, The Workers' Museum and The Holocaust and Genocide Centre. In 2012, van den Berg completed a large-scale mosaic commission for Spier Art Trust in London, titled Coming to the City.

Artist's Statement

I often use watercolour to think through something. It requires such modest preparation; a desk, some trusted brushes, a few blocks of colour and, of course, water. At the end of an afternoon, I might have ten propositions to choose from or simply to throw in a drawer for future consultation or destruction. This work was one of many preparatory studies, a landscape of sorts.

Cité Experience

I had never been to Paris. I knew it only through the eyes of other artists, especially Delacroix, Ingres, David and Gericault. There are scores of others besides and my mind was full of their images. So, when I actually got there the city was familiar and yet, not. Everywhere I walked I saw through a palimpsest of previous looking. An ironwork balcony evoked Matisse, who in turn evoked Manet and Caillebotte. I could not look at a shadowed piece of Gothic masonry without thinking of Monet. Crossing the Place de la Concorde inevitably brought that great opening sentence to my lips. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ….”. Indeed, Paris is a city suffused with narration, from Dickens to Ella Fitzgerald, Émile Zola, Georges Simenon and countless others. Inevitably, and happily, these crowds of ghosts were my companions at the Cité, where I added to the palimpsest.