In the mind of Mark Manders, an exhibit can unfold as a work of fiction.
“I’m the artist who makes these things, but I’m also like a character,” he said in a video interview from his studio in Ronse, Belgium. Manders, 56 and a native of the Netherlands, probes the boundaries of sculpture, installation, painting and the written word in a constantly evolving body of work.
That duality expresses itself most clearly through an imaginary but autobiographical space that he has been developing since 1986, which he calls “Self-Portrait as a Building.”
This fall, Manders’s work will be on display at two large-scale exhibits in Europe and at Art Basel Paris. On Oct. 25, the Brussels gallery Xavier Hufkens will unveil a Manders show featuring new sculptural works and fictional domestic spaces.
The following week, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, will open a show dedicated to the interaction of Manders’s sculptural works and installations with the surrounding architectural space. And in Paris, from Oct. 18-20, new sculptures will be on display in the booths of both Xavier Hufkens and the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
Manders’s figurative sculptures appear as deliberately unfinished as they are serene. Examples include “Composition with Four Yellow Verticals” (2017-19), a foursome of oversize busts mounted on pedestals of raw wood and metal, and “Tilted Head” (2015-18), which rested outside Central Park in 2019. Both works are cast in bronze, but mimic the appearance of clay.
The artist’s fascination with the limits of reality and illusion finds expression in a longstanding inquiry into the mythological figures of sciapods, first referenced in ancient Greece. Manders has written two books and a fake Wikipedia page about the one-footed creatures, which will also appear in “Single Word Lamp,” a 2023 work featuring 81 slides with illustrations of sciapods, at the Hufkens show in Brussels.
He has also devised fake newspapers, or “Notional Newspapers” (2005-22), randomly juxtaposing every single word in the English language, using each word once.
The recently completed “Broom With Fives (Birthday Broom),” which will be on display at the show in Brussels, uses a broom as its base, with photographs and clusters of nails in groups of five, as well as handmade dice, laid on top of it.
In an interview, Manders reflected on his artistic development and process. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
How did you arrive at the concept of autobiographical but fictional spaces?
I started as a writer. And then I slowly decided to write work with objects. If you write sentences, you can really direct the reader’s thoughts. But if I write with objects, the person who reads the objects is creating their own.
I’m kind of shy in person, but as an artist I am not. If I compare myself now to 20 years ago, I have more language also because there are objects that generate other objects. I think I have a chance to say something more specific.
When I was 18 years old, I was hit with a strong feeling of gratitude to be alive. I wanted to freeze my thoughts and express how beautiful it is to think and feel. I was very interested in how we as humans started to create language and tools for our daily life. That moment was like a small explosion that still impacts me today.
If you walk by a tree, you can suddenly see how beautiful it is. But normally you just walk by because the mind doesn’t have the space to experience beauty all the time. As an artist, you can freeze something from daily life, and it can generate the same kind of beauty as a tree.
In 1994, you wrote about how semi-truths can become accepted as fact. This has of course become a more pressing issue today.
It took me something like 14 years to create what I called, at the time, fake newspapers. It was something almost poetic, but the term “fake newspaper” has a totally different meaning now.
At the moment, many people believe in crazy theories. I’m not a religious person, but I want to touch on something that, I think, comes from the same realm.
I became interested in sciapods because people actually believed in a fictional figure that has one leg with one foot and uses that as an umbrella against the sun. I spent several years learning everything about this word. It was interesting to expand and change its meaning and create a kind of fake history while including real images, for example paintings by Philip Guston and Maria Lassnig.
I think a really good piece of art can wake somebody up. You experience it in one second, but still think about it 10 years later.
What will be on display at the exhibit “Silent Studio” in Turin?
It will include plastic walls that I also have in my studio. I think you will really have the feeling that somebody just worked there. The walls float a bit, because they’re made of a thin material. There is a strange tension between fragility and the fact that it’s frozen in time.
I work on many different works at the same time, and if something doesn’t work out, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes a work stays silent for 10 years, for example the “Birthday Broom,” which I started in 2001 and just finished last week. It is like a three-dimensional poem. It is also a kind of scary, neurotic thing.
There are a million ways to finish a piece, but if you make the right decisions, it becomes something so powerful and strong that it can travel through time.
How did your sculpture of the four large busts, “Composition with Four Yellow Verticals,” come about?
When I was in art school, I was very interested in Piero della Francesca. I wanted to make a kind of bust of the back of a figure from one of his paintings, but was not allowed to do so because he’s such an important artist. Many years later, I was able to create this work. It’s on the one hand tough and brutal but also silent and peaceful.
I made them with wet clay which cracks when it dries. I correct some cracks, and sometimes I create new ones and then, at a certain point when it’s ready, there’s a long technical process to fixate the dry clay because it’s super fragile. Then a team from the bronze foundry comes to make a mold around it, which is also a long process.
Verticals have something melancholic, but can also be like a monument for loss. My wife is a psychotherapist and has identified something called shadow loss — people who lose something but cannot talk about it.
Does this relate to the new sculpture “Monument,” which will be at Art Basel Paris?
It’s a kind of a monument for hidden loss. Fifty years ago if someone lost a child, it was kind of forbidden to talk about it.
There is a lump of clay that is pushing against her throat. For me it was something soft, but it could also be a baby. It is very abstract.
With all my works, it is very important to me to give the sense that someone just made them and walked away. As a person, I would of course never make a “Broom With Fives,” but as an artist I live in a kind of fictional world with its own logic.
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