Collection: 'Form | Silence' - Vivian van der Merwe

At the point where language falters and meaning dissolves into something beyond articulation, Vivian van der Merwe’s Form | Silence takes root. In his first solo exhibition with EBONY/CURATED van der Merwe presents nine new paintings that resist narration, offering instead a meditation on stillness and form.

A deeply considered artist, van der Merwe works within a lineage of painters who engage with structure, and the tension between containment and openness. As Zoe Earle Storrar Molteno observes, van der Merwe’s work “translates the classical virtue of gravitas into a painterly whole that shifts between painted reality and sculptural force. The image asserts itself as an entity, contained by the unfailing presence of the format. The classical stillness of Vermeer, the palette of Rembrandt, the sometimes playful balance of coloured, contained spaces in Mondrian, the flattening of shapes a là Ben Nicholson, the delicacy and whimsy of Klee, the intuitive precision of Joseph Albers’ saturated colour with a deep deference to Henri Matisse – all these elements come together in still, massive wholes which encapsulate that most prized pictorial and spatial quality in painting: that of monumentality”. These works absorb, reconfigure, and refine tradition. Each piece asserts itself as a totality—exacting yet unbound.

For van der Merwe, painting is not simply an act of representation but a pursuit of the ineffable. He reflects: Van der Merwe’s precision is not rigid but instinctive, his compositions carefully calibrated to evoke a sense of subtle grandeur. These works resist excess, stripping away the extraneous until only the essential remains. Colour is treated with a profound sensitivity, at times restrained, always intentional. In these paintings, silence is not an emptiness but a force—charged, luminous and inexhaustible.

Form | Silence is an invitation into profound stillness—a space in which form lingers in a state of quiet tension and absence is as palpable as presence.