In the mind of Mark Mandershola play, 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, open to the public Oct. 18-20, new sculptures will be on display in the booths of both Xavier Hufkens and the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
Image“Monument” (2024), which will be on display at Art Basel Paris. “It’s a kind of a monument for hidden loss,” Manders said.Credit...The artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels. Photo by HV-studioManders’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.
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