Mark Manders: The Absence of Mark Manders

Mark Manders exhibits in a post-Brutalist masterpiece by architect Juliaan Lampens.

The Absence of Mark Manders unfolds in the House Van Wassenhove, a post-Brutalist house for a bachelor designed by Juliaan Lampens in 1974. In jarring contrast to prevailing depictions of clean and mostly empty Brutalist interiors, the original occupant, Albert Van Wassenhove, who lived there until his passing in 2012, stuffed the house to hoarder-like proportions. 

The Absence of Mark Manders treats Lampens’s architecture with the dignity of the permanent sculpture that it is, while also putting forth Van Wassenhove’s logic of accumulation. Although Manders has hardly touched some spaces, he treats the bed, office, and kitchen as stages for aggregation in line with the original occupant’s mindset: drawings, architectural proposals, photographs, artworks, paint pots, and seemingly wet clay are piled on top of one another. These spaces have been used as an artist’s studio, unveiling traces of a temporary occupant living in, and thinking with, Lampens’s architecture. In Manders’s words: “The aim is to show the house in a perfect situation. While some spaces derail when you zoom in on them, there is a kaleidoscopic element to them, as if you are looking inside a head.”

The exhibition was curated by Laurens Otto and made possible with the generous support of the Government of Flanders, the Mondriaan Fund, The Dutch Embassy in Belgium, and Puilaetco.

About Mark Manders
Since 1986, Manders has been working on the ongoing project Self-Portrait as a Building. The idea for this monumental, self-searching project took root when the artist created Inhabited for a Survey (First Floor Plan from Self-Portrait as a Building) – a fictional floor plan – formed with writing implements that were on Manders’s desk at the time of the sculpture’s creation. By continually recycling, modifying, and creating new arrangements of favoured configurations and objects – human figures, animals, furniture, and architectural elements – Manders expands the limits of this decades-long conceptual self-portrait.

Artist talk
October 7, 2023, 11am
In light of the exhibition, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens is organising a conversation between Mark Manders and art historian Angelique Campens in the Kerselare Chapel, a pilgrimage site designed by Juliaan Lampens.
info and tickets

Publication
Mark Manders—House with All Existing Words
Roma Publications, 2023
Release date: September 20, 2023

Featuring photographs by Tim Van de Velde and Mark Manders and designed collaboratively by Roger Willems and Mark Manders, this publication accompanies the exhibition The Absence of Mark Manders at House Van Wassenhove.

Edited by Laurens Otto, the publication draws inspiration from the publications of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the 1950s, which harmoniously converged text and images through simple and effective production and layout. This booklet will be available through Roma Publications and the MDD webshop, as well as at the exhibition.

Press enquiries
rik.vannevel@museumdd.be