About the Commission: Room with Broken Sentence

Room with Broken Sentence contains elements of Manders’ earlier work while highlighting new steps the artist is taking. The proposed works form a coherent whole, representing the fantastic aspects of his oeuvre: installations, sculptures, offset print on paper and architectural interventions. All works combine a certain mystery with tremendous visual appeal. Manders’ use of materials, in which nothing is what it seems (epoxy looks like clay, clay becomes brass and brass seems to be wood), enhances this enigmatic visual impact. 

The larger installations developed specially for the Rietveld pavilion reveal significant new aspects of the artist’s formal and conceptual vocabulary. Turning his back on the frenetic consumerist dynamics of today’s cultural system, Manders withdraws into sculptures that seem to have always been there. His work directly confronts reality and is more than just hermeneutics. Leaving the shelter of the ‘white cube’, it infiltrates, blends into and seeks acknowledgement within a reality close to that of the general public. 

1. Composition with Blue, 2013, Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York 

2. Ramble Room Chair, 2010, Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp 

3. Unfired Clay Figure, 2005-2006, Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens 

4. Perspective Study, 2011, Collection: Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis 

5. Composition with Yellow Vertical, 2010, Collection: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford 

6. Fox / Mouse / Belt, 1992, Collection: The MoMA, New York

7. Room with Chairs and Factory, 2002-2008, Collection: The MoMA

8. Composition with Short Verticals, 2010, Private collection, London

9. Finished Sentence, 1998 - 2006,  Collection: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

10. Two Interconnected Houses (Slide nr. 10), 2010, Collection: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, S.M.A.K. Ghent

11. Life-size Scene with Revealed Figure, 2009, Collection: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis