MY MAGICAL ATTIC: MARK MANDERS: MINDSTUDY AT VOORLINDEN MUSEUM

November 15, 2025

MARK MANDERS: MINDSTUDY AT VOORLINDEN MUSEUM

September 20, 2025 – January 18, 2026

Mark Manders (1968) explores the quiet depths of human consciousness. The internationally acclaimed artist fixes thoughts and moments in sculptures, paintings and installations that hover between the tangible and the elusive. His oeuvre breathes a poetic tension: intimate and universal, concrete and mysterious. For Voorlinden he brings together more than eighty works –both iconic and more recent pieces – which together form a layered journey through his world of thought. The solo exhibition Mindstudy is on display from 20 September 2025 to 18 January 2026.

Mark Manders, who grew up in Volkel in North Brabant, is one of the most respected artists of his generation. From his studio in Ronse, Belgium, he creates a rich, idiosyncratic body of work of sculptures — often with androgynous faces — layered paintings and installations that radiate a quiet, timeless intensity. They balance between the familiar and the uncanny and force you to look more closely: what do you actually see? In his work bronze can appear as wet clay or a wooden plank, a forgotten myth is distorted, and furniture is shown at 88 per cent of its real size. Manders uses language as a starting point and composes, with materials and objects, sentences whose meaning only partly reveals itself.

Mark Manders: ’I am interested in the strength and the vulnerability of our thinking, in the fact that we, as thinking beings, are susceptible to errors of thought, neuroses – and also to hope.’

A JOURNEY INTO THE IMAGINATION

In Mindstudy Mark Manders invites you to follow him through the spaces of his thinking. At Voorlinden he constructs a living room, a bathroom, factories and studio spaces — and to do so, the museum’s interior is substantially reworked. He starts on the estate and inside the museum, he redirects the entrance into his exhibition. There unfolds a world of frozen thoughts and arrested moments. There is no chronological ordering: early work may look recent, while other pieces have the aura of an archaeological artefact. Subtle connections and echoes arise between the works, which link to and refer to one another. One example is the monumental installation Room With Three Dead Birds and Falling Dictionaries, in which painted dictionaries fall onto collages of newspapers that contain every English word, while — as the title reveals — three dead birds are hidden.

A WRITER WITH OBJECTS

At the age of eighteen Mark Manders decided to become a writer. Not with words, but with objects. Since then he has been steadily working on his life’s work Self-Portrait as Building — an imaginary construction in which sculptures, paintings, installations, drawings, publications and graphic works function as frozen thoughts and actions. Manders studied at the Arnhem Academy of Art and settled in Ronse, Belgium, in 2005. The Dutch artist received early international recognition, exhibiting at Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002), in the Dutch pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and in museums and galleries from New York to Japan and from Brazil to Germany. In 2017 he realised a permanent fountain on the Rokin in Amsterdam. Voorlinden has maintained a close relationship with the artist for decades and now owns more than a dozen of his works.

Barbara Bos, head of exhibitions:

‘In Mindstudy, Mark Manders draws you into an interior world of thought and being. As you wander through a setting of crystallised ideas and images, the exhibition evokes both confusion and fascination – a true visual and intellectual challenge.’

LARGE COMPOSITION WITH RED, 2017

Painted Wood and Apoxy, Iron

Dimensions: 257,5 x 75 x 97,5 cm

‘’ My work often arises from assignments I give myself. In essence, they are recorded actions. Here I wanted to create a work that would fit seamlessly into the year 1920, but was never made at the time – I wasn’t alive then. It now fills a small gap in art history. The composition is built from verticals, and for me it is the best image one can create with this particular quantity of wood and clay. It is like a musical chord of verticals; had I made one slightly longer, wider, or redder, the harmony would have been entirely different.’’

Mark Manders

SUITCASE WITH DOG AND PILLOWS

( FRAGMENT FROM A SELF-PORTRAIT AS A BUILDING ), 1992

Painted Ceramic, Wooden Suitcase, Pillows

Dimensions: 22 x 64 x 47 cm

‘’ As a starting point for my work, I often take a word from our language and look for the best possible way to capture it in clay. Here, I imagined creating the work some 4,000 or 5,000 years ago. How might someone from an ancient culture have stylised a dog? This is but one of millions of possible outcomes. I always try to create an image that stands outside time, that conveys more than the object itself. In this case, it is a dog that is neither dead nor alive, but has rather skipped life altogether. It appears to be made of wet clay, as though someone has just created it and then walked away. ‘’

Mark Manders

PERSPECTIVE STUDY, 2005-2025

Offset Print and Acrylic on Paper, Wood, Steel, Fluorescent Tube

Dimensions: 280 x 141 x 8 cm

ANTHROPOLIGAL TROPHY, 2015-2018

Bronze, Brass, Stainless Steel, Painted Wood, Offset Print on Paper, Glass

Dimensions: 44,2 x 31,2 x 31,2 cm

‘’ As a time traveller and cannibal devouring images from many cultures, I created this work. I gathered fragments, reworked them, and combined them into an object whose origins can no longer be traced: it has something Catholic, Indonesian, African, and also early North American. ‘’

Mark Manders

CLAY FIGURE WITH THIN WHITE ROPE, 2013-2018

Painted Plasticrete, Apoxy and Canvas, Wood, Iron, Rope

Dimensions: Installation: 526 x 215 x 47 cm

BONEWHITE CLAY ANIMALS, 2024-2025

Painted Plasticrete, Canvas and Steel

Dimensions: 210 x 303 x 80 cm

‘’ Since 1986 I have been working on a spatial, three-dimensional book. I’m not writing it using words, but rather using objects and rooms you can walk through, each connected to the other. Furniture is part of this project too, such as this black cabinet in which two primitively shaped, leaping animals are bound together. ‘’

Mark Manders

COMPOSITION WITH VERTICALS, 2010

Wood, Painted Apoxy and Canvas

Dimensions: 88 x 31 x 22,5 cm

Piessens Collection BM

MONUMENT, 2024-2025

Painted Bronze

Dimensions: 215 x 135 x 140 cm

‘’ Grief is surely something we have in common while we are alive together. However, over the last few years, I have become more and more aware that there is also grief that remains in the shadows, hidden and unrecognized by the other. I decided to make a monument for a certain kind of hidden loss. In the first place, this work is a monument for my mother, who lost her son soon after birth. At that time, there was almost no place to give voice to this deep existential grief. It had to remain silent. Grief and forced silence do not sit well together. In this monument, I gently placed a hump of clay on the throat of a strong female figure. This small piece of clay speaks for all who have experienced hidden loss: loss of a pregnancy or baby, loss of the dream to have a child. It is also a monument for all parents who cannot have children, or couldn’t, or didn’t have a child and were left behind with an existential longing that finally turned into deep, interminable grief that needs connection and recognition. It is a monument for shadow loss. The way this work deals with this layered subject could not have been made without the love, strength and knowledge of my wife who is a psychotherapist for couples and individuals. She has taught me a lot about attachment, loss and hidden grief. ‘’

Mark Manders

NIGHT SCENE, 2020-2022

Painted Bronze, Hair

Dimensions: 48 x 27 x 22 cm

‘’ I made this after someone close to me lost a child; I wanted to capture that harrowing grief, like an Edvard Munch (1863-1944) scream, but one that is terribly silent. ‘’

Mark Manders

BONEWHITE CLAY HEAD WITH VERTICAL CLOUD 2025

Painted Bronze

Dimensions: 29 x 31,3 x 17,2 cm

HEAD WITH FALLING EARRING, 2025

Painted Bronze, Silver

Dimensions: 44 x 30 x 17 cm

“ In the black alcove stands a figure seen from behind. I wanted to brings together two words in this sculpture: ‘falling’ and ‘earring’. This creates something beautiful with time – you cannot tell what comes before or after. ‘’

Mark Manders

ROOM WITH THREE DEAD BIRDS AND FALLING DICTIONARY, 1993-2018

Canvas, Taxidermied Birds, Wood, Foam, Offset Print and

Acrylic on Paper, Wood

Dimensions Variable

FEMALE HEAD STUDY, 2015-2017

Painted Bronze, Rope, Wood, Glass and Acrylic,

Offset Print on Paper, Chicken Wire

Dimensions: 70 x 55 x 43 cm

LANDSCAPE FRAGMENT, 2017

Painted Canvas, Acrylic on Canvas, Wood, Sand, Typewriter

Dimensions: 20 x 40 x 16 cm

LANDSCAPE WITH FALLING CUP, 2019-2022

Painted Canvas, Wood, Epoxy, Iron

Dimensions: 61,5 x 59 x 60 cm

CLAY HEAD ON CONCRETE FLOOR, 2018-2024

Painted Bronze, Concrete, Wood, Glass

Dimensions: 72,7 x 88,7 x 64 cm

TORSO WITH FALLING EARRING, 2024

Painted Plasticrete, Silver, Wood

Dimensions: 26,5 x 49,9 x 35,7 cm

TROPHY, 2010-2013

Painted Apoxy and Rope, Offset Print and Acrylic on Paper

54,5 x 93 x 37,8 cm

BONE WITH THREE RELATED MOMENTS 2024

Painted Bronze

Dimensions: 44,5 x 10 x 5 cm

NIGHTFALL SCENE, 2024

Painted Bronze and Canvas, Wood, Iron, Apoxy

Dimensions: 50,5 x 42,5 x 22,5 cm

BONE WITH THREE RELATED MOMENTS 2024

Painted Bronze

Dimensions: 44,5 x 10 x 5 cm

FIGURE STUDY, 1997-2015

Patinated and Painted Bronze, Iron

Dimensions: 163,8 x 43,2 x 43,2 cm

FIELD FRAGMENT, 2022

Painted Steel and Sand, Wood, Glass

Dimensions: 92 x 182,5 x 80 cm

UNFIRED CLAY FIGURES ON CONCRETE FLOOR, 2015-2016

Painted Bronze, Wood, Concrete, Glass

Dimensions: 72,6 x 115,2 x 53,5 cm

LANDSCAPE WITH ALL EXISTING WORDS, 2005-2022

Offset Print and Acrylic on Paper, Painted Wood

Dimensions: 35,1 x 40,5 x 62,5 cm

NOVELIST LOUNGE CHAIR (WITH ALL EXISTING WORDS), 2005-2023

Print on Paper, Leather, Iron, Painted Wood

Dimensions: 71 x 141,5 x 50,5 cm

‘’ The pillow of this chair is made of fake, notional newspapers and contains every single existing english word of our language. The invention of language seems our biggest achievement but also has a dangerous weakness: if you repeat short lies and sentences and if you do that time and time again, they become like viruses that can anchor in a mind and then spread, from brain to brain. Language is a strange machine, it takes many many words to debunk just a single short lie. It seems that all these debunking words together just cannot conquer a simple repeated lie … they take too much time and space in a brain. It takes too many words to tell the truth. Language is the weak spot of humankind. ‘’

Mark Manders

STILL LIFE WITH THIN RED SENTENCE, 2020-2025

Painted Apoxy and Iron, Wood

Dimensions: 65,4 x 47,4 x 35,5 cm

LANDSCAPE WITH DICTIONARIES, 2015 – 2016

Painted Wood and Canvas, Wood, Sand, Rope

Dimensions: 22,5 x 38,5 x 55 cm

STUDY FOR SHORT SENTENCE, 2018

Porcelain, Rope, Painted Canvas, Wood

Dimensions: 11 x 55 x 13 cm

CAMOUFLAGED FACTORY, 2013-2025

Patinated Bronze Painted Wood, Canvas, Steel and Bronze, Pickled Steel

Dimensions: 346 x 410 x 520 cm

BONEWHITE FACTORY, 2015-2025

Painted Wood, Steel, and Rope, Pickled Steel

Dimensions: 375 x 300 x 510 cm

‘’ These factories were developed slowly and simultaneously over the past few years. Both are a cross between a living room scene and a factory; the word ‘factory’ is brought in twice. At the same time, both these machines are failing attempts to retrieve my youth. If you look under the factories, you can see that each of them is holding a pencil and making a mark. In that sense, they are factories that work for me, even when I am no longer here. ‘’

Mark Manders

VOORLINDEN MUSEUM

DRY CLAY HEAD, 2015-2016

Painted Bronze

Dimensions: ca. 233 x 155 x 283 cm

“ There’s both calmness and tension embodied in this work. By cutting the head at an angle, the scale shifts in an intriguing way. The dried clay conveys stillness, while a subtle cord at the back of the head introduces an unexpected tension. The cord, the wood, and clay are all painted bronze. ‘’

Mark Manders

UNFIRED CLAY HEAD, 2011-2014

Painted Bronze, Iron

Dimensions: 193 x 69 x 92 cm

Collection Voorlinden

“ For this sculpture, I made a workbench just like the ones from the 70s and 80s, but this one is stylised in the manner of the architect Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923). ‘’

Mark Manders

COMPOSITION WITH FOUR YELLOW VERTICALS, 2017-2019

Painted Bronze, Wood, Iron

Dimensions: 266 x 391 x 419 cm

“ This composition, in which four heads hold four yellow vertical beams in a beautiful position in space, belongs to a series of sculptures featuring yellow verticals, horizontals, and diagonals. They look like dried clay, yet they are painted bronze – and are technically very challenging to make. Together, they form a kind of three-dimensional painting. From their back, the heads and necks reference figures by Piero della Francesca (1412-1492). ‘’

Mark Manders

BONEWHITE CLAY HEAD, 2025

Painted Plasticrete, Plastic, Wood, Steel

Dimensions: 124 x 125 x 74 cm

“ For me, this kind of plastic has a fragile quality; it emphasises that special moment when the clay is at its most vulnerable. Here, the plastic covers the clay, as if to preserve its moisture. “

Mark Manders

ROOM WITH ALL EXISTING WORDS, 2005 - 2022

Mixed Media

Dimensions: 265 x 688 x 431,5 cm

STILL LIFE WITH INTERCONNECTED HOLES, 2006

Mixed Media

Dimensions Variable

‘’ Above the entrance to this room hangs a newspaper listing every English word that exists. From it, I chose one: ‘skiapod’, a forgotten mythical creature with a single leg and an enormous foot, which it uses as a parasol against the sun. I wrote a fictional history for it and let the word travel through different periods and media – through various objects in this living room, and even through a lamp. Most of the skiapods you now encounter online originate from my studio in Ronse. Not even Wikipedia can be trusted on this word. I wanted to explore whether it is possible to alter and manipulate the meaning and history of a single word. ’’

Mark Manders

“ Above the entrance to this room hangs a newspaper listing every English word that exists. From it, I chose one: ‘skiapod’, a forgotten mythical creature with a single leg and an enormous foot, which it uses as a parasol against the sun. I wrote a fictional history for it and let the word travel through different periods and media – through various objects in this living room, and even through a lamp. Most of the skiapods you now encounter online originate from my studio in Ronse. Not even Wikipedia can be trusted on this word. I wanted to explore whether it is possible to alter and manipulate the meaning and history of a single word. ‘’

Mark Manders

NOTIONAL CUPBOARD, 1989-2003

Wood, Iron, Radio, Glass, Rope, Paper, Photographs, Chair, Taxidermied Rats

Dimensions: 231 x 92 x 126 cm

Gruppe Junge Kunst, 2010

BROOM WITH FIVES - BIRTHDAY BROOM - 2001 - 2024

Broom, Offset Print on Paper, Wood, Nails, Dice and Playing Cards

Dimensions: 141,5 x 34,5 x 14 cm

“ Everyone knows that you can sweep things up with a broom. As an artist or poet, you can decide that a particular broom can only sweep up one specific word. In this case, only fives. Years ago, I decided to make five brooms that could only touch fives, and I found it interesting to say something different within the repetition of fives per broom. Two brooms each contain a newspaper with only f ives and five-letter words. In Birthday Broom, you see a five-year old girl on her birthday. She stands alone in a landscape, and in five steps the camera slowly flies away, rising upwards. In the final frame, she is far away in the landscape. Alone, as a five-year-old. It seems as if the parent has flown away. For many years, I wanted to create an image about the melancholic feeling a parent can have about a child growing up. Sometimes you wish you could freeze or hold onto a moment or an age. For me, this broom captures that melancholic feeling, in a poetic but also slightly unsettling, almost compulsive way. All five of the five-brooms act as a kind of mirror. ‘’

Mark Manders

MY BED, 1992-2024

Mixed Media

Dimensions: 81,5 x 180 x 220 cm

“ The picture frame takes the form of a double bed in this still life. On the canvas, various collections lie beside one another like a f igure next to an absent person; a still life of the bed of a hoarder. The collected objects are all part of seemingly personal subsets with different layers of meaning. In people with a ‘hoarding disorder’, objects can become almost inseparably intertwined with the inner self in a fascinating way. For me it is interesting that if you look at this still life, slowly an image of the missing character appears on the empty side of the canvas. ‘’

Mark Manders

PARALLEL OCCURRENCE, 2001-2021

Cast Aluminium, Aluminium, Painted Bronze, Stainless Steel, Rope

Dimensions Variable

“ I was looking for a way to express the gesture of handing over an envelope and the idea that the meaning of a message lies in the way it is transmitted. It is a short, threedimensional phrase hung high up in a tree, left behind by someone, intended to be found by someone else. “

Mark Manders

COMPOSITION WITH WHITE VERTICAL, 2020-2021

Painted Bronze, Patinated Bronze, Corten Steel

Dimensions: 190 x 69 x 45 cm

FOX / MOUSE / BELT, 1992

Painted Bronze, Belt

Dimensions: 15 x 120 x 40 cm

PATINATED HEAD, 2014-2025

Patinated Bronze, Corten Steel

Dimensions: 142,4 x 69 x 45 cm

MARK MANDERS

Although time and place-related references appear to be irrelevant in Manders’ work, there is one year that is often being referred to: 1986. This is the year in which Manders (Volkel, 1968) outlined the concept of his work, Self-Portrait as a Building. His work resembles a fictional building, divided into separate rooms and levels, of which the size and shape can never exactly be determined. Potential shifts and extensions constantly threaten the cohesion of the ever-expanding self-portrait. Manders works toward one big overarching moment that will bring together all his works, continuously interconnected and in dialogue with each other. There is no beginning or end. It is impossible to organize or date his works chronologically on the basis of visual clues. His work, in this way, might as well be created in the early 20th century; a thought he seems to eagerly embrace.

Before Manders embarked on his artistic career, he worked, as a teenager, in a graphic design studio. This is where his fascination for design and language, and particularly poetry, originated. Attempting to write a self-portrait in an unconventional manner, he soon hit the boundaries of language and translation. Words were substituted by visual elements. According to Manders, drawings, sculptures and installations are freer and can, just like poetry, incorporate different sounds, colours, rhythms, rhymes and interpretations. This is how the idea of Self-Portrait as a Building arose. Manders strives for timelessness and universality by using archetypal forms and familiar-looking materials such as clay, steel and wood. Manders’ sculptures and installations seem more fragile than they actually are. As a sculptor, Manders adheres to the tradition of bronze sculpture yet also incorporates contemporary materials in his work. Seats, chairs, chimneys are carefully created or recreated in function of the work and, where necessary, reduced to 88% of their original size. Blurring the line between reality and illusion, it often becomes difficult to distinguish when Manders is actually integrating natural wood or just a painted wood imitation. This also applies to the androgynous figures or faces that seem to have been fashioned out of wet clay, creating the impression that they just left the artist's studio or, conversely, were abandoned by the artist, mid-work. The illusion of peeling dry clay creates a sense of foreboding, as if the sculpture could crumble into fine dust and disappear at any time. There appears to be a definite separation between the sculpture and the person who realized it, as if it was abandoned by its creator or could not be completed. The persona of Mark Manders is never recognizably evidenced. Remarkable also is the dichotomy between the man Mark Manders and the artist, who, like an alter ego of sorts, seems to be directed entirely by his counterpart. Manders always places himself in this undefined place in-between, vastly enlarging the mystery of Self-Portrait as a Building.

In 2019 Public Art Fund commissioned Mark Manders to create a large public sculpture for the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, New York. He also created large outdoor sculptural installations for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2017) and for the Rokin Square in Amsterdam (2017).
Mark Manders recently had two solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art (in Tokyo 2021) and a duo exhibition with Michaël Borremans at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (2020). He also had solo shows at Bonnefanten in Maastricht (2020), at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea in Santiago de Compostela (2014), Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia (2014), De Vleeshal in Middelburg (2014), Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain in Nîmes (2012), IMMA in Dublin (2005), The Art Institute in Chicago (2003), The Renaissance Society in Chicago (2003), Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2003), amongst many others. His solo show ‘Parallel Occurences / Documented Assignments’ travelled from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2010) to the Aspen Art Museum in Aspen (2011), Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2011) and Dallas Museum of Art (2012). ‘The Absence of Mark Manders’ toured from Kunstverein Hannover (2007) to Kunsthall Bergen (2008), S.M.A.K. in Ghent (2008) and Kunsthaus Zürich (2009).
Manders participated in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (2019), the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2018), Museu Berardo in Lisbon (2018), MARTa Herford (2017), Wiels in Brussels (2017), Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar (2016), Kunstmuseum Bonn (2016), the Louvre in Paris (2015), S.M.A.K. in Ghent (2015), Guggenheim Museum in New York (2015), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2014), 21er Haus in Vienna (2014), The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford (2012), the Menil Collection in Houston (2012), David Roberts Arts Foundation in London (2012), MoMA in New York (2012), ICA in Philadelphia (2011), DESTE Foundation in Athens (2011), Kunsthalle Bern (2010), amongst many others.
In 2013 Manders represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennial. He was also included in the Ateliers de Rennes (2016), Athens Biennial (2007), Manifesta (2004) and the Venice Biennial (2001).

https://www.markmanders.com/bio

I may work as a freelance Architect. I graduated Yıldız Technical University Istanbul, Turkey. I prepare all the presantation by myself. This blog is my magical attic. Blog include that I already collected and will collect time by time past to future. Some of them influence me with their story , other fascinate me charm of colour, some is bents me differ of design. Some of them come into my life all the fascinating contex together that fuse different concept with there imagination and presantation. They all take part enjoyable place in my memory library to be as metaphor. Some of them I already forgot but when I seen them that make me in good spirits. Other is unforgettable. Some of them connect before to now that make to come new people in our life with new stories. Dream and reality fuses in life. All of them take part in this blog that I love.
I share all the knowledge of art, architecture, interior design, industrial design, people’ s story etc… without professional doubt. After all this progress , my magical attic will improve, get rich, increase and multiply when new comer join us day by day as our universe.
Please you may not hesitate to contact me. I may prefer to hear your idea that you could share with me your own work or other' s people work.

You could contact me :
mymagicalattic@gmail.com

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November 15, 2025

MARK MANDERS: MINDSTUDY AT VOORLINDEN MUSEUM