Kim Berman
Kim Berman is a Professor in Visual Art at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and is the Executive Director of The Artist Proof Studio in Newtown, Johannesburg.
Berman is a hugely energetic person who is deeply committed to political and social transformation in South Africa. She uses printmaking as a vehicle to reflect on the social and political processes that surround her. She has the uncanny ability to take a neglected, peripheral landscape and to transform it into an image that not only comments on society but is also transformed into something beautiful and poignant.
Artists at The Artists' Press (A to L)
Artists at The Artists' Press (M to X)
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Spring of Storms
The Spring of Storms monoprints evoke traces of war and social and environmental damage that disrupt a balance of justice and humanity. Fires have long served as a metaphor in my artwork as both destructive and regenerative. They hold the paradox of beauty and pain; as well as the hope of light emerging through a smoke-filled sky. Spring of Storms references environmental disruption, climate change and possibilities for renewed growth.
For each suite of four prints, I started with a rough charcoal drawing on tissue paper that we exposed onto an aluminium lithographic plate and gradually built up layers of monotype. Just as a smouldering fire changes from one moment to the next, the images change, with the layers of smoke revealing and obscuring the charred landscape. Kim Berman, 2024
Title: Ash Scape I
Medium: Monoprint
Size: 48 x 64 cm
Edition size: 1/1
Price: R 8 200 (excl. VAT)
Title: Ash Scape II
Medium: Monoprint
Size: 48 x 64 cm
Edition size: 1/1
Price: R 8 200 (excl. VAT)
Title: Ash Scape III
Medium: Monoprint
Size: 48 x 64 cm
Edition size: 1/1
Price: R 8 200 (excl. VAT)
Title: Ash Scape IV
Medium: Monoprint
Size: 48 x 64 cm
Edition size: 1/1
Price: R 8 200 (excl. VAT)
Title: Smoke Screen I
Medium: Monoprint
Size: 48 x 64 cm
Edition size: 1/1
Price: R 8 200 (excl. VAT)
Title: Smoke Screen II
Medium: Monoprint
Size: 48 x 64 cm
Edition size: 1/1
Price: R 8 200 (excl. VAT)
Title: Smoke Screen III
Medium: Monoprint
Size: 48 x 64 cm
Edition size: 1/1
Price: R 8 200 (excl. VAT)
Title: Smoke Screen IV
Medium: Monoprint
Size: 48 x 64 cm
Edition size: 1/1
Price: R 8 200 (excl. VAT)
Title: Spring Storm I
Medium: Monoprint
Size: 48 x 64 cm
Edition size: 1/1
Price: R 8 200 (excl. VAT)
Title: Spring Storm II
Medium: Monoprint
Size: 48 x 64 cm
Edition size: 1/1
Price: R 8 200 (excl. VAT)
Title: Spring Storm III
Medium: Monoprint
Size: 48 x 64 cm
Edition size: 1/1
Price: R 8 200 (excl. VAT)
Robben Island
After a very long drought of making images, I was invited on a two-week artist residency in the pre-famine village of Cill Railaig in Ireland in August 2017 and fell in love with the exquisite landscapes with its ancient standing stones and traces of ancient villages drawn with stones. The well-known comment by Carl Jung in Man and his Symbols came to life in his understanding of the symbolic power of the stones as “the containers of the spirit of the life-force with all its mystery”. A short while before, I had visited Robben Island and was struck by the way the stones in the desolate scrub held the memory and trauma of the site.
The series of Robben Island became a kind of counter-point to the green
and mystical Irish landscapes, in which both sets of images hold historical traces
of trauma of political and personal violence in the stones. Robben Island, a
name resonant with both extreme oppression and the humanity that birthed South
African democracy, is infused with material fragments and symbolic voices of that
hold the memory of human resilience. These monotypes are another way to explore
the evocative memory traces in the landscape.
Kim Berman, 2018
Title: By whose hand? Robben Island I
Medium: Monotype
Size: 41.5 x 77 cm
Edition size: 1/1
SOLD
Title: By whose hand? Robben Island II
Medium: Monotype
Size: 41.5 x 77 cm
Edition size: 1/1
SOLD
Title: By whose hand? Robben Island III
Medium: Monotype
Size: 41.5 x 77 cm
Edition size: 1/1
Price: R 7 650 (excl. VAT)
Title: The stones remember, Robben Island I
Medium: Monotype
Size: 41.5 x 77 cm
Edition size: 1/1
SOLD
Title: The stones remember, Robben Island II
Medium: Monotype
Size: 41.5 x 77 cm
Edition size: 1/1
SOLD
Title: The stones remember, Robben Island III
Medium: Monotype
Size: 41.5 x 77 cm
Edition size: 1/1
SOLD
Title: The quarry of memory, Robben Island I
Medium: Monotype
Size: 41.5 x 77 cm
Edition size: 1/1
SOLD
Title: The quarry of memory, Robben Island II
Medium: Monotype
Size: 41.5 x 77 cm
Edition size: 1/1
SOLD
Title: Fragments, the stones remember, Robben Island I
Medium: Monotype
Size: 41.5 x 77 cm
Edition size: 1/1
SOLD
Title: Fragments, the stones remember, Robben Island II
Medium: Monotype
Size: 41.5 x 77 cm
Edition size: 1/1
SOLD
Plantations
The Plantation Lithographs are inspired by seemingly unrelated landscape
images that I photographed around the time of the xenophobic violence
in 2008. In June of the same year, rural areas close to the town of
White River in Mpumalanga were consumed by vast forest fires.
It was necessary for farmers to revive their badly damaged exotic fruit
orchards by drastically pruning the trees and painting them white with
lime in order to protect the exposed bark from the sun and possible
disease. For me the fields of white amputated trees in regimented rows
visually enacted the predicament of the alien; the shameful, drastic
marking and control of the other. Exploring this imagery through a range
of visual art techniques offered me a way of processing and exploring
both the fragility of South Africa's democracy, and of integrating and
accommodating radical dislocation into a deceptively ordinary landscape.
In
my work, landscapes have always provided a metaphor for South Africa's
transitions as a country: even in a poisoned, burnt, or smoke-filled
landscape, the light on the horizon sparks the energy and hope for the
cycle of change and imperative of renewal. Both of these series are set
in the winter of 2008: they speak of a stark, sterile, dry, cold, empty,
white, regimented aftermath of earlier fire, violence and chaos. But
winter is part of a cycle, and its moment does pass. Kim Berman, 2010
Title: Stripped, Lowveld Plantation I
Medium: Seven colour lithograph
Size: 57 x 76 cm
Edition size: 30
Price: R 6 350 (excl. VAT)
Title: Stripped, Lowveld Plantation II
Medium: Seven colour lithograph
Size: 57 x 76 cm
Edition size: 30
Price: R 6 350 (excl. VAT)
Ponds
Title: Red Ribbons on a Pond I, KZN
Medium: Nine colour lithograph
Size: 50 x 66 cm
Edition size: 40
Price: R 5 300 (excl.VAT)
Title: Red Ribbons on a Pond II, KZN
Medium: Nine colour lithograph
Size: 50 x 66 cm
Edition size: 40
Price: R 5 300 (excl.VAT)
Fires
Through the Wire: Lowveld Fires" refers back to the series of that I
have been working on using fire a smoke on as a metaphor for social
change in South Africa. The fire symbolises a process of burning and
purging to make way for new growth, while the smoke chokes and
suffocates the truth.
The introduction of barbed wire in this
series represents a barrier that recalls the symbolic landscape of
apartheid. There is a tension between the transparent layering and
political deception or betrayal of the broken promises of a "new South
Africa. Kim Berman, 2003
Title: Through the Wire: Lowveld Fire I
Medium: Seven colour lithograph
Size: 57.5 x 76.5 cm
Edition size: 45
SOLD OUT
Title: Through the Wire: Lowveld Fire II
Medium: Eleven colour lithograph
Size: 57.5 x 76.5 cm
Edition size: 45
SOLD OUT
Title: Through the Wire: Lowveld Fire III
Medium: Eleven colour lithograph
Size: 57.5 x 76.5 cm
Edition size: 45
Price: R 6 350 (excl.VAT)
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