A sense of timelessness pervades Mark Manders' work, encompassing sculpture, installation, and drawing, that interrogates the processes and implications of logic, and the relationship between human thought and objects.
Read MoreFragmentation, multiplication, or reduction of forms are recurring features of Manders' practice. Many of his works, which are diverse in material and scale, appear to be frozen in time as though the ever-elusive artist has just exited the scene.
In 1986, Manders began his long-term project of portraying himself as a building with Inhabited for a Survey (First Floor Plan from Self-Portrait as a Building). As the title suggests, the work was a floor plan of an imaginary building—presented on the floor—formed by the writing tools that the artist had at the time.
The conceptual, evolving self-portrait has accumulated numerous iterations over time, in different mediums, including the pencil on paper Drawing with Shoe Movement / Two Consecutive Floor Plans from Self-Portraits as a Building (May 21, 2002) (2002) that shows a plan of another fictional building. Manders does not attempt to capture his personal feelings or history in his self-portraits, rather focusing on 'the way objects can generate thoughts' in relation to the body as he writes in a statement.
At the time of creating Inhabited for a Survey, Manders had wanted to be a writer and approached the work as a basis for a written self-portrait. Increasingly, however, the artist shifted towards sculpture, drawn to the medium's ability to exist as timeless objects as opposed to the linear progression of books or the written language. As Manders told Ocula Magazine in 2021, sculpture enables thoughts to become frozen objects, 'that you can treat like language' by reconfiguring its components and incorporating them into installations.
Writing remains a salient aspect of Manders' practice, and the artist is the co-founder of the independent art publisher Roma Publications along with graphic designer Roger Willems and artist Marc Nagtzaam.
Often featuring unfinished surfaces or what appear to be abandoned scenes, Manders' works seem to exist in states of incompletion or ambiguity. A partially complete human figure leans against a chair in Clay Figure with Iron Chair (2009), while the human body in Ramble Room Chair (2010) is stuck in the midst of being sculpted over a long piece of wood. Suspended in action, Manders' sculptures and room installations hint at traces of the artist and his thoughts without yielding legible narratives.
Multiple parts, whether as a result of fragmentation or multiplication, are common across Manders' work. Room with Fives (1993–2001) only contains fives of the same object, and the human figure is divided into vertical parts in works such as Vertical Clouds (2021–2022).
Manders has also created room installations dedicated to a single or multiple words. Room with All existing Words (2005–2022), the centrepiece of his solo exhibition at Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, in 2022, features newspapers with every word in the English language and drawings dedicated to 'Skiapode,' an old word for 'a strange, failed myth'. In creating different forms of Skiapode, Manders considers the workings of the human mind—when certain words get lost over time, but others proliferate.
Mark Manders has exhibited extensively in solo and group presentations. In 2010, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles presented a major retrospective of Manders' practice, titled Parallel Occurrences / Documented Assignments, that travelled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; and Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, between 2011 and 2012.
Solo exhibitions include Mark Manders, Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp (2022); The Absence of Mark Manders, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2021); The Absence of Mark Manders, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands (2020); Writing Yellow, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2019).
Group exhibitions include The Secret Life, Gallery Baton, Seoul (2021); Accelerate your escape: Gary Hume explores the Hiscox Collection, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Surrounded: 11 Installations, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Walking On the Fade Out Lines, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai (2018); Room With Broken Sentence, Dutch Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Documenta 11, Kassel (2002).
Mark Manders' website can be found here, and Manders' Instagram can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2022
