“I’ve often heard that it’s very difficult to write about my work,” Mark Manders told me, “but I think my work is very clear.” In business discourse, there’s something called the “sweet spot,” when a product or service is strategically placed in between things and results in success. Intentionally or not, Manders appears to have done the same in an art context. While attracting widespread interest, his work has created a framework for varied discussion through a positioning of intuitively constructed visual elements that can be very hard to place. Manders has exhibited extensively over the past 20 years, beginning in his native country of the Netherlands and then expanding across Europe and into the United States. Highlights include his solo presentation at the Dutch Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, as well as solo shows at the Dallas Museum of Art (2012), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010), Kunsthaus Zürich (2009), Kunstverein Hannover (2007), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2006), the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2005), the Art Institute of Chicago (2003), and the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden Baden (1998), among many others. …see the entire article in the print version of May’s Sculpture magazine.
