MARK MANDERS. CURCULIO BASSOS
Mark Manders (Volkel, Netherlands, 1968) is one of the most important international artists of the last two decades and boasts one of the most unique and personal bodies of work that can be seen on the international art scene. In addition to representing his country at the 55th Venice Biennale, he has had exhibitions at many of the top museums and art centers in the world, as well as participating in Documenta 11 in 2002. A variation on the work he presented in Kassel will be on view at CGAC’s Double Space.
Mark Manders is, in essence, a sculptor and his work is infused with poetry. It all started out with his legendary Self-Portrait as a Building, which he created in 1986 when he was just 18 years old, having realized that he had ‘a certain affinity with the language of visual arts.’ All of his later works are an unceasing, open-ended variation on his first creation, where he attempts to come to an understanding of something that appears to be simple, but is, at the same time, deeply complex: the fact that the world is populated by human beings and that these human beings create objects that stay with them over the course of their lifetime. Based on this premise, Manders has created a unique and formal universe that under no circumstances ignores this vital source of inspiration which is poetry and, in the broader sense, writing—a kind of writing that does not use words, at least not always, but rather objects and shapes.
This summer the CGAC will host his first solo exhibition in Spain. The show brings together works created over the course of different stages in the artist’s career, including artwork from museums like the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the S.M.A.K in Ghent, the Kunsthaus in Zurich and the Rabobank collection, in addition to others hailing from private collections. Also on view in Santiago de Compostela will be some of the artist’s earlier works which he has reinterpreted for this exhibition.
With financial support from the Mondriaan Fund:
