Mark Manders: Writing Skiapod

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present Mark Manders: Writing Skiapod, on view at the gallery’s Los Angeles location from February 11–April 8, 2023. The artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery, this is Manders' first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since his 2010 solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum, which also traveled to the Walker Art Center, the Aspen Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art.

Throughout his decades long practice, Mark Manders has created an expanding but timeless architectural space whose arrangement is constantly being rebuilt and transformed. Rooms are populated and reimagined in an ongoing project that extends beyond the artist's own subjectivity of the present moment. This imagined framework, wherein all of the artist’s sculptures and installations belong, has a non-linear narrative where contradictions co-exist: the ancient and the future, the temporary and the permanent, the beautiful and the grotesque, reality and fantasy. Long interested in language and the written word, each object Manders conceives of can be thought of as words in dialogue, forming abstract sentences. Similar to the words in a dictionary, they are linked together in one moment, frozen in time. Manders gives physical form to a dreamlike psychological space where each object is rendered with subtle alteration of scale and material. 

“Painting,” less as a practice and more as a concept, a word to be manipulated and subverted, serves as a foundational thread in this exhibition. In Composition with Two Painted Heads and Composition with Painted Head, the portrait bust reemerges among Manders’ essential archetypal forms, but here the object is presented as canvas. The canvas heads are tinted with a sky blue pigment the artist has employed throughout his practice to suggest the sky in a landscape from Vermeer or Mondrian or Van Gogh. In Painted Head a head is sandwiched between vertical elements that upon closer inspection are revealed as small stretched canvases. Juxtapositions of objects and materials inherent to an artist’s studio are employed in a way that subverts the traditional definition of media, or crosses genres, presenting objects that exist simultaneously as painting, poem, sculpture, and text. 

Please join Mark Manders and Heidi Zuckerman at 5 pm on Wednesday, February 15th for a walkthrough of the exhibition. Heidi Zuckerman is the CEO and Director of the Orange County Museum of Art and Creator and Host of the About Art podcast.