Timelessness is a fundamental aspect in Manders’ work, although his entire oeuvre can be brought back to one decisive year, 1986, in which his concept of ‘Self-portrait as a Building’ originated. His androgynous sculptures are impossible to define in time and place, feeling both unfinished and age-old at the same instance. The illusion of peeling dry clay, as in “Composition with Two Ropes", creates a sense of foreboding, as if the sculpture could crumble into fine dust and disappear at any moment. Perspective studies are also a recurrent motif in the artist’s work, a technical endeavor which he feels every artist since the Renaissance should attempt at. Manders builds his “Perspective Studies” out of self-made newspapers in which every word from the English dictionary has been used only one time and placed in a random order.
Mark Manders has a solo exhibition in the Bonnefanten, Maastricht, which will reopen on 2 June. In September ‘Double Silence’, a duo exhibition with Michaël Borremans, will open in the 21st Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.