Mark Manders

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Mark Manders (born 1968 in Volkel, Netherlands) is a Dutch artist who lives and works in Ronse, Belgium. He creates installations, drawings and sculptures, and is best known for large bronze figures that look like rough, wet or peeling clay. He also arranges ordinary objects—tables, chairs, light bulbs, blankets, even dead animals—into quiet, unusual compositions.

Manders trained as a graphic designer and studied at the ArtEZ Academy of Art & Design in Arnhem from 1988 to 1992. He developed a personal visual language where objects stand in for words. After graduating, he won the Dutch Prix de Rome second prize in Art & Public Space in 1992. In 1988 he co-founded Roma Publications to produce and share art books with artists and writers. In 2007 he moved to Belgium to find a larger studio, settling in an old railway station building in Ronse. He is represented by Xavier Hufkens (Brussels), Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York and Los Angeles), and Gallery Koyanagi (Tokyo).

Since 1986 he has worked on Self-portrait as a building, a series of fictional architectural plans. The first piece, Inhabited for a Survey, drawn on the gallery floor, imagines an alter ego—the artist Mark Manders as a neurotic, sensitive person who exists only in an artificial world. Each exhibition includes a growing floor plan and various works, guided by this imagined architecture, which he calls a “machine” that lets the work decide its form. He often tests new works in everyday spaces like supermarkets to see if they can exist outside museums.

Manders has had many notable solo shows and represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2013 with Room with Broken Sentence. He has won several prizes, including the Heineken Prize for Art in 2010 and the Philip Morris Art Prize in 2002. His work is held in major museums and collections worldwide, including MoMA in New York and the Guggenheim, among others.