Today at the Museum

Mark Manders: Parallel Occurrences/Documented Assignments

January 15–April 15, 2012
Hoffman Galleries

The first major North American exhibition of work by acclaimed Dutch artist Mark Manders, Mark Manders: Parallel Occurrences/Documented Assignments features a body of new sculptures and works on paper created specifically for it. This nationally touring exhibition includes roughly fifteen new sculptural works and three loaned works, one of which is from The Pinnell Collection of Dallas.

Since 1986, Mark Manders has been engaged in what he calls his “Self-Portrait as a Building,” an ongoing, monumental project that has come to define his overall practice. Language, as title, content, and formal structure, remains a key element of his process, in which objects are accumulated in a manner that replicates sentences. As the artist explains, “This building can shrink or expand at any moment . . . all words created by mankind are on hand.” In effect, Manders gives thoughts physical form; his hypothetical building becomes an evolving space through which he investigates the process of thinking.

His installations employ everyday objects (sugar, tea bags, a pencil, a toothpaste tube) as narrative subjects. Manders ultimately creates mysterious and uncanny sculptural tableaux—part still life, part exquisite corpse. In so doing, Manders makes a physical as well as mental space for the viewer to “enter the world of objects and matter and find poetry in it . . . and to know how poorly we normally see our daily life.”

Mark Manders: Parallel Occurrences/Documented Assignments is co-organized by Aspen Art Museum and the Hammer Museum.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue designed in close collaboration with the artist. The coordinating curator of the Dallas presentation is Jeffrey Grove, The Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art.

This presentation is made possible by TWO X TWO for AIDS and Art, an annual fundraising event that jointly benefits amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research and the Dallas Museum of Art. Additional support is provided by the Contemporary Art Initiative through the gifts of an anonymous donor, Arlene and John Dayton, Jennifer and John Eagle, Kenny Goss, Nancy and Tim Hanley, Marguerite Steed Hoffman, Janelle and Alden Pinnell, Allen and Kelli Questrom, Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, Deedie and Rusty Rose, and Sharon and Michael Young. Air transportation is provided by American Airlines.

About the Artist: Mark Manders currently lives and works in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and Ronse, Belgium. He has shown widely in group exhibitions around the world including the Venice Biennale, Documenta, the Berlin Biennal, and the Carnegie International. His solo exhibition The Absence of Mark Manders was shown at the Kunstverein Hannover in 2008.

Visit Mark Manders’ website: markmanders.org.

Excerpt from The Canvasconnection Flemish TV program on Mark Manders.

Images:

Mark Manders, Finished Sentence, 1998–2006, iron, ceramic, teabags, and offset print on paper, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Mark Manders, Large Figure with Book and Fake Dictionaries, 2009, painted canvas, painted epoxy, wood, painted wood, offset print on paper, and rope, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

The Dallas Museum of Art is supported in part by the generosity of Museum members and donors and by the citizens of Dallas through the City of Dallas/Office of Cultural Affairs and the Texas Commission on the Arts.

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