The Greene Naftali Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new and recent work by Dutch artist Mark Manders. Manders’ second one-person show with the gallery, the installation will be on display October 11-November 9, 2002.

Since 1986, Manders has worked on an evolving, multifaceted project entitled “Self-portrait as a Building.” Exhibitions of this project often take the form of muted, reduced installations of furniture, found objects, abstracted homunculi sculptures, and childlike, expressive drawings layered with references to symbolic orders devised by the artist. Recent presentations of fragments of Manders’ project include an extensive installation at Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002) and an exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, Canada (2002). In 2000, “Night Drawings from Self-portrait as a Building” was exhibited at Kabinet OverHolland, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and The Drawing Center, New York.

“The artist Mark Manders is a fictional person. He’s a character who lives in a logically designed and constructed world which consists of thoughts that are halted or congeal at their moment of greatest intensity. It’s someone who disappears into his actions.”

Mark Manders on Mark Manders, The Netherlands, 2002

In the current iteration of Manders’ “Self-portrait,” a sparse layout of furniture pieces turns the gallery space into a screen for the artist’s imaginative projections. A white, modular kitchen console has a faucet running into a basin-less sink. A bed, a wardrobe, and a chaise lounge appear heavy and institutional and are made from simple combinations of welded steel and brown modeling clay. Laid out on the chaise is a vaguely human form, into whose face a pencil dangles from a wire armature. Complementing this arrangement, a pair of 16mm films projects twin images of drawn clown figures, one mouth agape in terror or speech, the other lips open and perhaps teeth clenched. Loose webs of points and lines, the figures appear suspended or flying through space, an effect accentuated by the fluttering filmic image.

The linking of objects, gestures, and materials in this and other installations of Manders’ project creates a complex impression of hidden, mutating order, what many critics refer to as a private “cosmology.” However, Manders offers not so much an imaginary world as a field of existential hypothesizing: an artificial construction of representation and identity as conjecture, difference, surrogate, and displacement.

Manders was born in 1968 and lives and works in Arnhem, The Netherlands. A forthcoming exhibition of his work is set to appear at the Art Institute, Chicago in 2003. Two new publications on the work have recently appeared: Singing Sailors, a retrospective catalogue published by Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, 2002 and a book concerning Manders’ drawings, entitled Several Drawings on Top of Each Other published by ROMA, 2002.