Mark Manders

For his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, Mark Manders presents new work ranging from monumental bronze busts to abstract sculptural landscapes and discrete paintings and works on paper. Dreamlike and fragmented, these new pieces populate the gallery like a series of thoughts to which the artist gave form and then froze in time. Experienced together, the works form a kind of scenography of the mind for the visitor to move through and inhabit. Over the course of his thirty-year career, Manders has centered his practice on the creation of poetic and paradoxical fictional worlds. In Manders’ installations past, present, and future exist simultaneously, gravity is at once emphasized and defied, the boundaries between painting and sculpture are permeable, and language is simultaneously all-powerful and insufficient. In his work, experiences that are universal and yet indescribable like melancholy, are given powerful form. Serving less as evidence of his own life, thoughts, and existence, Manders sees the scenes, environments, and individual works he creates more as tools to explore the idea of subjectivity itself. In keeping with his interest in an object that can represent or explore subjectivity, the bust is an archetypal form for the artist, and in the ground floor exhibition space Manders presents, Bonewhite Clay Head with Vertical-Cloud, a large-scale head that appears to be made from cracked white clay. The dry, white, fissured surface is a color and texture that is unplaceable, both ancient-seeming and otherworldly. In the past, Manders has made works that reference the distinct and physically tactile materiality of clay and its transitional phases. Some forms, painted to appear as wet clay, have even been covered in plastic sheeting to further the illusion of soft vulnerability and give the sense that their maker has only recently departed. Later works have appeared dry and cracked and even surrounded by fake dust in order to present the illusion of dryness; still fragile, but ultimately realistic. This new phase of material suggests the unattainable ideal, an archetype of form, a surface of clay pulled out of a dream by the artist, existing in some alternative version of reality, or from another era. Monument, a giant female head made of painted bronze, sits near Bonewhite Clay Head with Vertical-Cloud, its texture the same cracked white. A lump is attached to the figure’s throat, and it sits in silent stillness. Manders made this work as a monument for his mother who lost a baby just after birth, and for all who have experienced grief that had to remain silent. The lump sits on the figure’s throat, like words caught on their way to expression, but bound to the woman, unable to break free, yet made visible.