Shany van den Berg

Born in 1958, Shany van den Berg is a senior and well-known artist. She is an internationally acclaimed artist, and her works are in prestigious public, private and corporate collections worldwide. Shany is a three-time finalist for the BP Portrait Award at London's National Portrait Gallery. She is a multidisciplinary artist, experimenting with a wide range of mediums and techniques like painting, drawing, sculpture, site-specific installations, mixed media, three-dimensional work, and found objects, among others. She also indulges in literature, music, and poetry. 

Shany is trained in a ceramics course under Ralph Johnson at Paarl College. She practiced ceramics for 10 years. Later, as a part-time student, she learned painting and life drawing from the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town in 1990. Her idiomatic expression primarily consists of contemporary figurative, flora/ fauna, and portraiture, highlighting the ideologies of womanhood. For her works, she takes inspiration from the old master's style of rendering. And her works display emotions, posture, an eye for detail, and conceptualization of the themes by precisely using symbolism. Reflecting upon womanhood and being a mother, her works are surreally abstract, where the line between reality and essence draws the political idea. 

Mapping the history, culture, and mythology through a renewed visual fable, Shany's representations denote her experience through the passage of time and existence. Her oil paintings are sensitive and graceful. The composition and execution of the paintings become a mode of process, thoughts, and remembrance of present-day womanhood.

Since 1992, Shany has lived and works in Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa.