In conversation with Sanne Bolten. Photography by Thibault De Schepper.

From 1605 Magazine No.3, Duality

They tower above: four colossal bronze busts of female faces, eyes sealed in silence. Across their features run thin yellow vertical beams, interrupting the forms. Standing over four metres tall, dipped in muted greige, they rest on wooden platforms and steel supports. Solid yet delicate, their cracked texture suggests clay, belying their true material. The surface tricks the eye as much as it defies it. They hover with a spectral lightness, as if projections rather than presences. In truth, Composition with Four Yellow Verticals (2017-2019) is just that: metaphors of the self, ideas given flesh by the artist Mark Manders. Tangible but still firmly lodged in the thoughts from which they were born. Embodying the same idea, his studio in Ronse, designed and built by architectural firm Coussée Goris Huyghe, is part of a lifelong work: Self-Portrait as a Building. Initiated in 1986, the project stands as an ever-evolving Gesamtkunstwerk, with the studio functioning as an enlarged scale model of Manders’ mind. What emerges is a kind of infinite regression, where the artist walks his own pathways of thought. And, with it, his art presented in situ.

A studio as a self-portrait

Outside, raw concrete dominates, fronted by a black timber façade that seems to pull visitors inward—straight into the funnel of his creative cortex. The building is more than just a workplace; within are the optimal conditions for his artistic practice and its ongoing articulation. Spanning summer and winter ateliers, a carpentry shop and a metal workshop, it is both infrastructure and imagination made real. And with a versatile oeuvre such as Manders’, perhaps that breadth is a prerequisite. Yet his lifelong pursuit of self-portraiture originated from a wholly different desire, namely that of becoming a writer. “I was deeply fascinated by writing from an early age. Above all by books that were written in the first person,” he says. “I liked the idea that when you read them, it feels as if you are thinking inside the head of someone else. And really, the figure of the ‘other’ is the most compelling thing there is in the world.”

From writer to maker

An investigative thinker and Kafka admirer, he kept circling around the idea of authorship, of self-expression, of observation. “But I soon became caught in a knot, because I was still so young and had little to say. Though I did feel this overwhelming urge. I was captivated by the brain and how it can also go astray,” he recalls. At one point, he even considered becoming a psychologist. “But what intrigued me most was the simple fact that, as humans, we live inside our heads. What is that, to be a human who thinks?” Manders elaborates. He had planned to spend his whole life writing about it. And he would—though perhaps not so directly as imagined. After mapping out all his writing materials, another direction emerged organically: a sort of written self-portrait. It was intended as a book without beginning or end, forever in draft mode. A work existing only in language, projected onto the floor plan.

Yet in the process of writing, he found that directing the reader’s mind through words held little appeal. He preferred the opposite—not overtly personal interpretations but, rather, something abstract. His attention shifted to what he had already laid down, the physical manifestation of his process and its direct effects on him. His own height in relation to objects on the floor, the way light dramatically altered the ballpoint, the changes that occurred inside his head when he brought his eye closer to the eraser. There was something cinematic in that. It presented a turning point. “I looked at the floor plan and realised, I had made a thing, I had put something new into the world. An object. I found that to be magical, and beautiful,” Manders explains. Thus came the idea of creating rooms where something can truly be lived. Spaces where time halts, where one can almost retrace the motions and thoughts of a fictional figure. Abandoned rooms, bearing traces of past actions. Charged with a palpable immediacy, as if the maker were about to return at any moment to resume the work. “What I’ve built is really a vast, motionless building that you can walk through in parts. A spatial book, in a way.”

“What I’ve built is really a vast, motionless building that you can walk through in parts. A spatial book, in a way.”

A spatial book

And so, for decades, Manders has been constructing an endless trail of thought, within a mental architecture. Along the way, he has produced fragmentary sculptures, layered canvases and poetic installations that suspend action and thought in equal measure. This lifelong pursuit has earned him international recognition and renown. From the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo to Fondazione Prada in Milan, from MoMA New York to the Louvre in Paris—his works have occupied some of the world’s most significant stages and are represented in leading public collections. To this list of achievements must be added the many awards, ranging from the Philip Morris Art Prize to the Prix de Rome. His practice grazes the existential, the linguistic, the neurological. And, in doing so, the universal. He pares back, he prods, layer after layer, until an essence is reached. One that the viewer then takes possession of and reflects back, beyond the work itself. “As an artist you can create something that someone takes in within seconds. The encounter is so brief, but somehow it can still stay in your head. I find it so strange that this can happen, that it can even assume a kind of function in your thoughts. It intrigues me endlessly.”

Holding something still

Working as a graphic designer in his late teens, Manders studied at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Arnhem (now ArtEZ Academy of Art & Design) from 1988 to 1992. It was in these formative years that his fascination with design and language—and particularly poetry—developed into a visual idiom of his own, where words were replaced by objects. His work quickly gained traction, and in 1992, he began exhibiting widely. Watching films by Andrej Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman at the local arthouse, where entry was free for students, left a deep impression. “At the time I felt a bit envious that as a director you could state so precisely: ‘now you think this’ or ‘now you see this’. As an artist or sculptor, you have much less control over that,” Manders recalls. But then came a shift, a moment of change in how he understood the static nature of other art expressions. “Gradually, I became convinced of the unique power of sculpture, that it can hold something still, while the world continues to revolve around it,” he adds.

“Gradually, I became convinced of the unique power of sculpture, that it can hold something still, while the world continues to revolve around it.”

Rules and the friction they bring

Restriction, whether self-imposed or not, and the friction that comes with it, is something Manders likes to work with. Consider Traducing Ruddle (2010), the self-published newspaper in which he printed every English word in existence. “Every word that exists belongs to me in a sense, and I have the right to use it,” Manders says. A project that was more than just playful or ingenious, it was also integral to his practice. “Because my work is frozen in time. I cannot use newspapers from 2022 or from 1998, since time, in my work, does not advance. Yet, I need them, sometimes for papier-mâché, for example, and it must be ones that truly exist. The only answer was to create one myself, a newspaper that itself stands still,” he clarifies. There is a duality at play here, a contradiction, that captivates him. “On one hand I am free to use everything, yet even something as simple as a piece of newspaper is difficult to integrate, because in my own rules it does not belong. That tension interests me,” Manders adds. He devises rules and then finds intricate ways to work around them. Art may allow for boundless freedom, but he deliberately restricts himself, almost as a game of constraint.

When something is right

Looking back on the collaborative process of designing his studio, Manders points to another dimension: that of correctness. “We really tried to go as far as possible, even though everything was made with prefab elements, to make sure it felt in place. The proportions had to be exact,” Manders says. He sees this exactness as something that extends beyond form. “In some way, when something is right, an elusive thing happens. Something you can still sense fifty or eighty years later, it will still feel true. Rietveld made a few works like that. And when we look at them now, they still bring us joy,” he remarks. “How is it that this is a language that touches something in all of us? I find that so remarkable; it is not just intuition. It is something we collectively hold somehow.”

Fifteen years, or a few days

Another thing that is not easily defined, for Manders, is the completion of a work of art. The maturation of a piece does not follow a fixed formula or a defined process. “Some things take fifteen years before they are finished. Other ones complete very quickly, I can make them in just a few days. And if you put them side by side, you won’t see a difference. It’s quite bizarre how that works.” Why this happens is difficult to pinpoint, though it seems bound to the opaque logic by which his work takes shape. “I honestly do not understand how this occurs. Sometimes I simply don’t know how to continue something, or the opposite, where I have too many options.”

Ordinary objects, recast

Beyond his self-fabricated pieces, Manders also turns to the ordinary, investigating objects and phenomena drawn from daily life. From chairs and tables to cups, lightbulbs and cutlery, these elements are recast in new light in his works. In his world, they tend to resemble a kind of Morse code, as in Finished Sentence (1998–2006). Composed of iron, ceramics, teabags and other materials, the work suggests a musical instrument—or at least an object aspiring to produce sound. Teabags are arranged as though forming words that wish to be heard or notes awaiting performance. During his student years, Manders lived in a house of jazz musicians, where he first encountered the genre. Searching for a way to define what he could not quite seize in the music, he inserted a brief phrase and transformed it into language.

A poem of a single word

Another analytical work, which occupied him for more than ten years, rests on a simple idea: could a poem be made of a single word? Manders filtered one from his newspaper and explored it across various media. The choice was skiapode, from the Greek ‘shadow foot’. “It refers to a largely forgotten mythical creature, one-legged, with a massive foot used as a parasol or tool,” he notes. Its obscurity intrigued him. “Because hardly anyone knows it, I can redefine it in the real world.” From there, he constructed a false narrative and history, including a fabricated Wikipedia page where fact and fiction blur. It confronts both artist and audience with the reality of our time: the ease with which disinformation is produced and made credible and the precariousness of our minds and societies it exposes. As part of his research, he published La Scomparsa Degli Sciapodi, ‘The Disappearance of the Skiapodes’, accompanied by a manual explaining a trick that makes the images fade to greyscale and disappear.

A time traveller

Here, we find a parallel dissolution of the term, a natural progression described in another publication as ‘put the word to rest’. It is as if the word evaporates after a brief flare, like the lifespan of a newly coined buzzword. At the same time, it offers a glimpse into the psyche of an artist who always succeeds in finding the unconventional within the conventional. A cognisant perceiver, tuned to detail and led by uncompromising curiosity. “I feel that I have always lived in a very interesting time,” Manders says. “I sometimes feel like a time traveller, able to step into different periods and observe. As if the entire world is available to me within my work.”

“I sometimes feel like a time traveller, able to step into different periods and observe. As if the entire world is available to me within my work.”

This interview was first published in 1605 Magazine No.3, Duality.