SHANY VAN DEN BERG (SOUTH AFRICAN B. 1958)
Music without sound
initialled and dated SVDB/01 (lower left)
oil on board
96 x 68 cm

PROVENANCE:
Everard Read Gallery

Van den Berg's portraiture is most often of women, whose features morph into a composite of the artist and her loved ones, serving as portals to narratives of sacrifice, struggle and ultimately transcendence. The references are delicate and ambiguous: a nude atop a gallery plinth is transposed from stone into flesh and blood, or vice versa; a sheet draped, shroud-like, across an ethereal form emerging from or entering an abyss; hands depicted in gestures of supplication, prayer, self-protection or release; a red scarf or fragile scarlet thread seeming almost to flutter across and beyond the canvas.