Mark Manders and Melanie Deboutte | In Conversation | Xavier Hufkens

Mark Manders discusses his current exhibition with curator Melanie Deboutte in this new video.

“As a child, I was very interested in the human mind—both its strength and its weakness, which led me to decide to become a writer. I started out by making a floor plan of all the writing materials I had and decided to write about that imaginary building for the rest of my life. Soon, I realised that it’d be much better to write with objects than with words, so I eventually became an artist instead of a writer.”— Mark Manders

Mark Manders expands his seminal ‘Self-Portrait as a Building’ project with multiple new rooms for his inaugural exhibition with the gallery. Installations referencing domestic spaces, including a bathroom, bedroom and studio, take their place alongside monumental and domestic-scale painted bronzes, mixed-media sculptures, objects, furniture and two-dimensional works.

Mark Manders (b. 1968, Volkel, the Netherlands) lives and works in Ronse, Belgium. Mark Manders represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in 2013. He was commissioned by the Public Art Fund to create a large public sculpture for the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park, New York in 2019. Other large-scale outdoor sculptural installations are on display at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and at the Rokin Square in Amsterdam. Public collections include The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Carnegie Museum of Art, PA; Kunsthaus Zürich; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, LA; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center, MN, among others.

Melanie Deboutte is Director/Curator at Roger Raveel Museum in Machelen-aan-de-Leie. After studying Art Science at the Universities of Leuven and Ghent, she explored the Belgian art world as a staff member at various museums, from S.M.A.K., Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens and Mu.ZEE to M Leuven, Z33 and M HKA. She has been working as an independent curator and researcher since 2013 and has organized several exhibitions, often with a particular focus on the development of contemporary art from the 1960s to the 1980s in Belgium. She also regularly writes reviews and essays for art magazines, collection and exhibition catalogues and artist publications.

More on the artist: https://www.xavierhufkens.com/artists...
More on the exhibition: https://www.xavierhufkens.com/exhibit...