Mark Manders: Parcours, Art Basel 2018

House with Notional Newspapers, unfolds in different rooms of a Basel apartment. By covering the windows with self-made and nonsensical newspapers and using plastic foils, Manders creates the impression that an isolated artist has been working here for some time. Some of the works seem to have been fashioned out of wet clay, suggesting that they were recently abandoned by the artist, mid- work. Other sculptures show fine craquelures which catapult the works further back in time. Manders strives of timelessness and universality by using archetypal forms and familiar-looking material such as clay, steel, and wood. His compositions are fragile and poetic. In 1986, Manders outlines the concept of his work Self-portrait as a Building which function as a metaphor for his complete body of work: a fictional and ever-expanding space, divided into different rooms and levels continuously interconnected and in dialogue with each other. 

Room with Three Dead Birds and Falling Dictionary is a large space covered with a layer of unprepared canvas under which there are several layers of foam. Under the foam there are three dead birds. Because of the many layers of foam it is impossible to perceive where exactly the birds are located - which leaves the viewer in an uncomfortable situation. On the walls there are eight works on paper which depict falling dictionaries. As is often the case with Mark Manders, he is predominantly interested in the images that these words generate. In this case these are two words that are very rarely put together in a sentence and thus create a new poetical image. The dictionaries have been painted on his self-made newspapers.