Mark Manders: Curculio bassos

Mark Manders (b. 1968, Volkel, Netherlands) is, in essence, a sculptor and his work is infused with poetry. It all started out with his legendary Self-Portrait as a Building, which he created in 1986 when he was just 18 years old, having realized that he had 'a certain affinity with the language of visual arts.' All of his later works are an unceasing, open-ended variation on his first creation, where he attempts to come to an understanding of something that appears to be simple, but is, at the same time, deeply complex: the fact that the world is populated by human beings and that these human beings create objects that stay with them over the course of their lifetime. Based on this premise, Manders has created a unique and formal universe that under no circumstances ignores this vital source of inspiration which is poetry and, in the broader sense, writing—a kind of writing that does not use words, at least not always, but rather objects and shapes.