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Mark Manders: Fragments from Self-portrait as a building |
 
Room, constructed to provide persistent absence
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Organized by the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto May 30–July 26, 2002 Opening Reception: Concurrent Exhibition: The Galleries at Moore are pleased to present “Mark Manders: Fragments from Self-portrait as a building” featuring recent works from an ongoing project which explores drawing as a sculptural process and the metaphysical essence of thoughts, words, and images. This is the first solo museum exhibition for Manders in the United States, and serves as an introduction and closer examination of the work of the Dutch artist. Manders has been working on his Self-portrait as a building since 1986—an ongoing investigation that evolves with each subsequent presentation. The “building” itself is a fictional architecture created as a portrait of a fictional persona sharing the artist’s name and described by the artist as equally neurotic and poetic. Each installation or reconfiguration of this “mental space” becomes a container for discrete objects that are physically and figuratively linked in a seemingly offhand manner by their placement in a particular room and the resulting observed or felt relationships to objects around them. A bronze dog rests its head on a pile of 4,000 drawings, the headless lump of a figure lies on an iron bed with a blue ball-point pen suspended above an opening in its chest, five ordinary teabags quietly form a sentence in the corner-these juxtapositions are charged with the inventive potential necessary to the process of interpretation that is at the heart of Manders's project. The aim is not to create a convincing narrative description of an event, place, thing, or person with each installation; rather, Manders’s work explores distinctions that only exist in thought—between nameable things and things we cannot name, between thought and object—and the metaphysical processes at work within those distinctions. The exhibition at the Goldie Paley Gallery will include six artworks which were recently presented in an exhibition organized by Loretta Yarlow at the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, Canada. Mark Manders will be working directly with the curator of the Goldie Paley Gallery to design a unique installation for the Galleries at Moore in Philadelphia. Manders was born in 1968 in Volkel, The Netherlands. He has had solo exhibitions at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2000); the Project Room, Drawing Center, New York (2000); Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden Baden, Germany (1998); Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp (1994). He has participated in group exhibitions including Sonsbeek 9, Arnhem (2001); Venice Biennale (2001, 1993); “Territory, ” Tokyo Opera City Gallery (2000); XXIV São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (1999). His work will be included in Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany, 2002, and this fall at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mark Manders lives and works in Arnhem, Netherlands. Life: A User’s Manual. Laura Hoptman, curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art will introduce Manders’s continually evolving Self-portrait as a building. Hoptman is responsible for organizing the Carnegie International, one of the most prestigious international contemporary art exhibitions in the United States. She has contributed an essay to the forthcoming catalog of Manders’s work (published by AGYU to accompany this exhibition) and has included Manders in her upcoming investigation of contemporary drawing practices, “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions,” scheduled to open at the new MoMA facilities in Queens, New York, this fall.
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Generous support for “Mark Manders” has been provided by the Mondriaan Foundation, Netherlands, and the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. A portion of the galleries' general operating funds for this fiscal year has been provided by grants from Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and the Friends of the Galleries at Moore. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency that fosters innovation, leadership, and a lifetime of learning, supports the operating expenses of the Galleries at Moore. Special thanks to the William Penn Foundation, The Philadelphia Foundation, and the Louis N. Cassett Foundation for their support of educational programs. |
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