Mark Manders (1968) explores the quiet depths of human consciousness. The internationally acclaimed artist fixes thoughts and moments in sculptures, paintings and installations that hover between the tangible and the elusive. His oeuvre breathes a poetic tension: intimate and universal, concrete and mysterious. For his solo exhibition Mindstudy at Voorlinden, he brings together more than eighty works – both iconic and more recent pieces – which together form a layered journey through his world of thought.
20 September 2025 - 18 January 2026
Mark Manders, who grew up in Volkel in North Brabant, is one of the most respected artists of his generation. From his studio in Ronse, Belgium, he creates a rich, idiosyncratic body of work of sculptures — often with androgynous faces — layered paintings and installations that radiate a quiet, timeless intensity. They balance between the familiar and the uncanny and force you to look more closely: what do you actually see? In his work bronze can appear as wet clay or a wooden plank, a forgotten myth is distorted, and furniture is shown at 88 per cent of its real size. Manders uses language as a starting point and composes, with materials and objects, sentences whose meaning only partly reveals itself.
Mark Manders: ‘I am interested in the strength and the vulnerability of our thinking, in the fact that we, as thinking beings, are susceptible to errors of thought, neuroses – and also to hope.’
Mark Manders, Composition with Four Yellow Verticals, 2017-2019
A journey into the imagination
In Mindstudy Mark Manders invites you to follow him through the spaces of his thinking. At Voorlinden he constructs a living room, a bathroom, factories and studio spaces — and to do so, the museum’s interior is substantially reworked. He starts on the estate and inside the museum, he redirects the entrance into his exhibition. There unfolds a world of frozen thoughts and arrested moments. There is no chronological ordering: early work may look recent, while other pieces have the aura of an archaeological artefact. Subtle connections and echoes arise between the works, which link to and refer to one another. One example is the monumental installation Room With Three Dead Birds and Falling Dictionaries, in which painted dictionaries fall onto collages of newspapers that contain every English word, while — as the title reveals — three dead birds are hidden.
Director Suzanne Swarts: ‘Mark Manders’s enigmatically beautiful work lodges in your memory and plays with your mind; it is shrouded in a veil of estrangement — it feels intimately close, but always remains beyond reach.’
Mark Manders, Clay Figure with Thin White Rope, 2013-2018, Collection museum Voorlinden
A writer with objects
At the age of eighteen Mark Manders decided to become a writer. Not with words, but with objects. Since then he has been steadily working on his life’s work Self-Portrait as Building — an imaginary construction in which sculptures, paintings, installations, drawings, publications and graphic works function as frozen thoughts and actions. Manders studied at the Arnhem Academy of Art and settled in Ronse, Belgium, in 2005. The Dutch artist received early international recognition, exhibiting at Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002), in the Dutch pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and in museums and galleries from New York to Japan and from Brazil to Germany. In 2017 he realised a permanent fountain on the Rokin in Amsterdam. Voorlinden has maintained a close relationship with the artist for decades and now owns more than a dozen of his works.
Barbara Bos, Head of Exhibitions: ‘In Mindstudy, Mark Manders draws you into an interior world of thought and being. As you wander through a setting of crystallised ideas and images, the exhibition evokes both confusion and fascination – a true visual and intellectual challenge.’
Mark Manders, Large Composition with Red, 2017, Collection museum Voorlinden, photo: Lieven Herreman