15 july 2025, Flor Linckens
Singer Laren presents the blooming universe of Marc Mulders
Until 21 September, the Singer Laren museum is presenting a series of new paintings by Marc Mulders, with the garden surrounding his farmhouse on the Baest estate in North Brabant as its radiant focal point. Since 2008, Mulders has lived and worked here, a place that marked a turning point in his artistic practice. In this exhibition, his canvases enter into a dialogue with the iconic museum garden by Piet Oudolf, situated right next to the Van den Brink Gallery. The rich colours, natural textures and fragile beauty of the garden are a continuous source of inspiration for the artist, as is the cycle of life and transience it embodies. Mulders is represented by KERSGALLERY.
The artist’s impasto, pastel-hued oil paintings breathe the energy, rhythm and delicate beauty of nature. His farmhouse studio garden overflows with flowers he planted himself, which he affectionately calls his own private Giverny, a reference to Claude Monet’s famed garden just outside Paris. Among blooming lavender and wild daisies he finds the shapes and motifs that he subsequently translates onto the canvas, with a brush and palette knife. Sometimes still lifes emerge, with his brushes serving almost as gardening tools. In earlier works, Mulders also reflected on the fact that his personal paradise was under threat when illegally dumped contaminated soil damaged the nature reserve surrounding his studio.
Mulders often draws on art historical traditions in which flowers symbolise mortality. His work is also subtly infused with religious themes: echoes of paradise, shadows of good and evil. His inspiration stretches beyond the Western canon; alongside the work of artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Rembrandt, Chaïm Soutine, Helen Frankenthaler and Willem de Kooning, he finds inspiration in Chinese ink painting and Persian miniatures. In addition to his abstract paintings, Mulders is active as a photographer, watercolourist and stained glass artist.
His glass works can be found in the Sint-Stevenskerk in Nijmegen, Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht, the Sint-Janskathedraal in Den Bosch and the memorial window for the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, created to mark Queen Beatrix’s 25th anniversary on the throne.
Marc Mulders was born in 1958 in Tilburg and studied at the Sint Joost Academy of Art and Design in Breda. In 1985, he won the Prix de Rome and in 2017 he was named Artist of the Year. His work has been included in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, ABN AMRO, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the Rijksmuseum, Rabobank, the Noordbrabants Museum, the Van Abbemuseum, Museum Voorlinden, De Nederlandsche Bank, Museum De Pont, the Centraal Museum, NN Group, Museum De Lakenhal and the Dutch embassies in Berlin, London, Jakarta, Ottawa, Beijing and Sydney. His paintings have been shown in solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Frans Hals Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the Van Abbemuseum and Kunsthal Kade.
