Mark Manders
Silent Studio
31 October 2024—16 March 2025
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents Silent Studio, the first survey exhibition of Mark Manders in an Italian institution. The exhibition brings together new works alongside a wide selection of pieces created over more than thirty years, presented in an immersive environment designed specifically for the occasion.
Over the past decades, Manders has gained international recognition for his innovations in sculpture, characterized by an ongoing conceptual and material experimentation. At the core of his practice is the relationship between language, sculpture, and fiction, developed through the long-term project Self Portrait as a Building. Initiated in 1986, this project moves away from a literal and biographical approach to construct an expanded idea of self-portraiture and explore the narrative potential of sculpture. In this framework, Manders’ artworks correspond to “visual words,” while his exhibitions serve as the “rooms” of an imagined building—a constantly shifting reflection of the artist’s identity and narrative.
The subject of Silent Studio is Manders’ studio, a space both real and conceptual, that merges seamlessly with the minimalist architecture of the Fondazione. The exhibition features over twenty works, including sculptures, paintings, works on paper, installations, and furniture in bronze, steel, and iron. Despite their solid construction, Manders’ works convey a sense of transience and vulnerability, with their unfinished appearance and the use of enduring materials like bronze to simulate the fragility of clay.
Created over several years and, in some cases, decades, these sculptures feature an expanding and contracting sense of time, alluding to a timeless past and an ongoing present. The artist challenges the linear order of language to focus on the semantic plurality of sculpture, disconnected from chronology and thus open to interpretation. An ode to the fictional, Manders’ work invites viewers to engage with the material representation of the imaginary.
The exhibition celebrates the long-standing relationship between Mark Manders and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, beginning with the artist’s inclusion in Guarene Arte 97 with the work Fox / Mouse / Belt (1992), featured in the exhibition. Upon that occasion in 1997, the artist received the Premio Regione Piemonte for his project Self-Portrait as a Building.
