Van Den Berg, Shany
Shany van den Berg was born in Riversdale, South Africa in 1958. Specialising in contemporary portraiture and figurative work with a strong central theme on womanhood, van den Berg works in oil paint on board and linen, mixed media on paper and perspex as well as sculpture.
After a studying for a diploma in nursing for 3 years, she did a part time ceramic course under Ralph Johnson at Paarl College in the 1980s, after which she worked as a ceramist for 10 years. Van den Berg then studied life drawing and painting part-time at the Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town in 1990.
Since then, van den Berg has been working as a full time artist. She was a finalist in 2005 in Sasol New Signatures. Out of more than 2000 applicants, van den Berg was chosen as one of 50 finalist artists for the 2009 and 2010 BP Portrait Awards show at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Her 2010 oil on board painting, ‘Bloedlyn – Sannie en Leah’, shows two woman at very different stages of their lives.
Shany has had 11 solo exhibitions from 1999 to 2012, the most recent at the Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg. She also participates in many group exhibitions, both locally and internationally. Among several projects , she was part of ‘10’, a collaborative workshop in 2004 with 9 other artists in the Castle of Good Hope, exploring the first 10 years of democracy, as well as an Art Exchange with the Hubei Institute of Art China in 2008, both through Everard Read, Cape Town.
In March 2013, she was awarded a Fellowship from the Ampersand Foundation , to spend a month in their artist residence in New York. Van den Berg was one of ten women artists selected for the project ‘Femininity’ curated by Eva Roer in Germany in October 2013. At the same time, van den Berg was part of the 100 Year Commemorative exhibition ’Universal Suffering’ at the War Museum of the Boer Republic in Bloemfontein.
In December 2013, she was part of the Centenary exhibition of Everard Read Gallery in Cape Town. In January 2014, she took part in Cape Town’s Suidoosterfees exhibition, ‘Cape Town Re-imagined’, which formed part of the Design Capital 2014 project. In March 2014, she is part of ‘Magicus’, a group exhibition at the D-Street Gallery in Stellenbosch which forms part of the annual ‘Woordfees’.
Shany is a mother of 4 children and lives and works as a full time artist in Stellenbosch.