The Artist Mark Manders on Fictional Spaces and ‘Shadow Loss’

In the mind of Mark Manders, 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, from Oct. 18-20, new sculptures will be on display in the booths of both Xavier Hufkens and the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

Manders’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.