SHANY VAN DEN BERG: BinneTuin / Garden Within

Everard Read Cape Town is pleased to present BinneTuin / Garden Within, a solo exhibition by Shany Van den Berg.

Opening reception: Thursday 10th October - 6pm

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When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.

– Georgia O’Keeffe

If Paris is known as the City of Lights, those who explore it also know it as a city of plants. Offering an encounter with greenery around almost every corner, its streets and squares contain more than four hundred parks, with the oldest extant garden dating back to 1564. A six-week residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in the summer of 2023 gave South African artist Shany van den Berg the chance to indulge her longstanding love affair with nature’s abundance in this verdant city.

Her latest solo, BinneTuin / GardenWithin stems from this fecund period, when Van den Berg allowed herself to soak in all that Paris has to offer a flâneuse (a keen-eyed wanderer who chronicles the details of urban life). Leaving the familiar things that define her at home, Van den Berg began her creative explorations by walking the streets of the city, collecting visual imagery in discarded scraps of posters as well as newspapers, photos and impressions. The stories of each day were transformed into a visual diary through collage, drawing and painting – creating a close companion to share experiences with while so far from home.

The distance was deeply felt in the aftermath of a family tragedy. Experiencing the discomfort of dual emotions – the beauty of a new place, and the pain of loss – Van den Berg embraced her familiar muse. At the root of all her work lies a devotion to plant life passed from mother to daughter. For Van den Berg, these motifs, memories and knowledge all centre on the cycles of changing seasons mirrored in family lines and individual lives.

This is exemplified in her monumental ‘hanging garden’. Inspired by a wall of creepers on a favourite street in Paris, under which she found shade and rest, Van den Berg has created a lush, organic textile installation through cutting, crocheting, knitting and painting forms, draped from ceiling to floor. Van den Berg invited her three daughters to help by cutting the inner layers of the piece onto which, over many months, she added shapes and textures representing foliage and flowers – a meditative way of processing their shared grief. Through dedicating so much time to physical engagement with an artwork, it has become a psychological object in itself, beyond the imagery it depicts.

Our understanding of the artist’s connection to nature, womanhood and the artist’s place in the world is nurtured by the rest of the exhibition. She has arranged the curves and colours of flowers in oil paint, with a nod to Georgie O’Keefe, and grown gardens over the skin of painted figures which reference the reclining nudes of Delacroix. To capture a plant on canvas or in bronze is to stop time – to give it eternity. For Van den Berg, depicting plants is a matter of self-reflection. She is sharing the love, purity, passion, beauty, innocence, death and new life of the garden within.

Van den Berg's practice centres on contemporary portraiture and figurative work, with an underlying theme of womanhood. She has worked as a full-time artist for almost thirty years. She is a three-time finalist in the BP National Portrait Award in the UK (now the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award), as well as a three-time finalist in the South African Sanlam Portrait Award. Her practice includes painting on board, linen and found objects, drawing, sculpture, site specific installations, mixed media, three-dimensional work as well as poetry and music. 

Installation images by Michael Hall