Zeno X Gallery has the great pleasure to announce a new solo exhibition by Mark Manders (b. 1968, Volkel, NL). This will be the artist’s fifth consecutive show since Manders joined the gallery in 1994. For the first time, the installation Staged Android (reduced to 88%), which he created for Documenta 11 (2002), will be shown in Belgium. Manders has continued to work on this piece after the presentation in Kassel and the work is now, 12 years later, fully completed. The exhibition will include new sculptures and installations which characteristically contain references to the past, the present and the future.

Although time and place-related references appear to be irrelevant in Manders’ work, there is one year that is often being referred to: 1986. This is the year in which Manders outlined the concept of his work, Self-Portrait as a Building. His work resembles a fictional building, divided into separate rooms and levels, of which the size and shape can never exactly be determined. Potential shifts and extensions constantly threaten the cohesion of the ever-expanding self-portrait. Manders works toward one big overarching moment that will bring together all his works, continuously interconnected and in dialogue with each other. There is no beginning or end. It is impossible to organize or date his works chronologically on the basis of visual clues. His work, in this way, might as well be created in the early 20th century; a thought he seems to eagerly embrace.

Before Manders embarked on his artistic career, he worked, as a teenager, in a graphic design studio. This is where his fascination for design and language, and particularly poetry, originated. Attempting to write a self-portrait in an unconventional manner, he soon hit the boundaries of language and translation. Words were substituted by visual elements. According to Manders, drawings, sculptures and installations are freer and can, just like poetry, incorporate different sounds, colours, rhythms, rhymes and interpretations. This is how the idea of Self-Portrait as a Building arose. Manders strives for timelessness and universality by using archetypal forms and familiar-looking materials such as clay, steel and wood. Manders’ sculptures and installations seem more fragile than they actually are. As a sculptor, Manders adheres to the tradition of bronze sculpture yet also incorporates contemporary materials in his work. Seats, chairs, chimneys are carefully created or recreated in function of the work and, where necessary, reduced to 88% of their original size. Blurring the line between reality and illusion, it often becomes difficult to distinguish when Manders is actually integrating natural wood or just a painted wood imitation. This also applies to the androgynous figures or faces that seem to have been fashioned out of wet clay, creating the impression that they just left the artist’s studio or, conversely, were abandoned by the artist, mid-work. Particular in this exhibition are the sculptures that evidence, for the first time, fine craquelures in their surfaces that seem to catapult these works even farther back in time. The illusion of peeling dry clay creates a sense of foreboding, as if the sculpture could crumble into fine dust and disappear at any time. There appears to be a definite separation between the sculpture and the person who realized it, as if it was abandoned by its creator or could not be completed. The persona of Mark Manders is never recognizably evidenced. Remarkable also is the dichotomy between the man Mark Manders and the artist, who, like an alter ego of sorts, seems to be directed entirely by his counterpart. Manders always places himself in this undefined place in-between, vastly enlarging the mystery of Self-Portrait as a Building.

Mark Manders has had solo exhibitions at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, The Renaissance Society in Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Kunstverein Hannover, Bergen Art Hall, SMAK Gent, Kunsthaus Zurich, La Casa Luis Barragan in Mexico City, the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Nimes, among others. From 2010 to 2012, his first major retrospective, Parallel Occurance / Documented Assignments, travelled throughout the United States with venues such as the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Aspen Art Museum, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Dallas Museum of Art.

At the Venice Biennale in 2013, Mark Manders presented his solo exhibition Room with broken sentence in the Dutch Pavilion in the Giardini. In early 2014, De Vleeshal in Middelburg (NL) organized the solo exhibition Acolyte Frena. His solo exhibition Cose in Corso is on view at the Collezione Maramotti (IT) until September 28, 2014. In July, a new solo exhibition opens at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea in Santiago De Compostela (ES). Following a commission of the Public Art Fund in New York, a new sculpture will be installed in Central Park in New York in the autumn of 2015. His work also features in group exhibitions including Beating the Bush at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, Re: visited in the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in Riga and See What Sees You at the 21er Haus in Vienna. Previously, Mark Manders has been invited to group exhibitions at the Palais Tokyo in Paris, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford (U.S.), the Menil Collection in Houston (U.S.), MoMA in New York (U.S.), RAM in Rome (IT), Magasin 3 Kunsthal Stockholm in Stockholm (SE), among others. In 2002 he was invited by Okwui Enwezor to participate in Documenta 11 in Kassel.

Recently, MoMA in New York has acquired an important work from the exhibition in Venice. The Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht (NL), the Centraal Museum in Utrecht (NL) and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis have also recently expanded their collection with work by Mark Manders. Other public collections of work by Mark Manders include the Art Gallery of Onatrio in Toronto (US), the Art Institute of Chicago (US), the Bonnefantenmuseum (NL), the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (US), the Centraal Museum Utrecht (NL), the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea in Santiago de Compostela (ES), the Dallas Museum of Art (US), the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin (IT), the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (IR), the Kunstmuseum Bonn (DE), LA MOCA (US), the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (SE), MuHKA in Antwerp (BE), the Museum Overholland in Nieuwersluis (NL), the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem (NL), the Noordbrabants Museum ’s Hertogenbosch (NL), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (US), the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (DE), Mu.Zee in Ostend (BE), S.M.A.K. in Gent (BE), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (US), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (US), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (NL), the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum (NL), The Menil Collection in Houston (US), the Hammer Museum in LA (US) and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford (US).