Mark Manders’ first exhibition at Xavier Hufkens: 'A house with infinite rooms'

After thirty years at Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp, which closed last year, the Dutch-Belgian artist Mark Manders is now represented by Xavier Hufkens in Brussels. To celebrate, a big solo exhibition is taking over all four floors of the gallery.

Visual artist Mark Manders grew up in the Dutch village of Volkel, but has been living in Ronse in the province of East Flanders for ages. For decades, he has been working on a single, still ongoing self-portrait: his Self-Portrait as a Building, a unique project including countless sculptures, installations, publications, drawings, and architectural plans.

His oeuvre can be seen as a house under construction, with more and more rooms constantly being added to it. This fictional construction is built not so much with the material of his own personal history, but rather with his very own bricks, which can take a different form in everyone’s head.

Originally, he wanted to sculpt with words and become a writer. Until he was convinced that he would express himself better with physical images. “With language, you dictate what people think. With objects, it’s only thoughts you’re touching, and you leave a lot more open,” he explained to the newspaper De Morgen.

Nothing is what it seems

Walking through Manders’ sprawling building, you stumble upon a lot of seemingly everyday objects, which you would find in any other house. There are tables, chairs, mugs, pencils, boards, newspapers, a piece of thread. But nothing is what it seems. The wooden board is actually made of bronze, the mugs are epoxy resin imitations. Manders printed the newspapers himself, with words arranged in a random order. Dates are nowhere to be seen, as his creations have to be completely timeless. Even the “inhabitants” of his building are impossible to assign to a time period.

Animals are everywhere, like the many dogs, and the curious fox with a leash on its belly, with a mouse wedged in between. The most famous inhabitants are the crumbling, cracked female statues, which seem to refer to classical antiquity or artists like Giorgio de Chirico and Constantin Brancusi. One of these sculptures, a monumental reclining head, or Tilted Head, stood in a Central Park entrance in New York for almost a year in 2019.

A nice demonstration of Manders’ love of blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination is the appearance of the so-called “skiapode” (shadow foot), in the many spaces of his work. A fantasy creature with one leg and a giant foot, serving as an umbrella against the sun. Besides images of this bizarre figure, he also wrote a Wikipedia-like page, extensively documenting the myth, without allowing you, as a reader, to decipher what is fact or fiction.

Mark Manders’ first exhibition at Xavier Hufkens
from 25/10 to 21/12
xavierhufkens.com