Mark Manders
Room with Broken Sentence
1 June–24 November 2013
Preview: 29–31 May 2013
The 55th Venice Biennale
Giardini, Venice
Curated by Lorenzo Benedetti.
Organized by the Mondriaan Fund.
The Mondriaan Fund has selected the presentation Room with Broken Sentence by curator Lorenzo Benedetti (b. 1972) and visual artist Mark Manders (b. 1968) as the Dutch entry for the 55th Venice Biennale that will take place in 2013. The Mondriaan Fund has followed the advice of a jury that chose the Benedetti and Manders plan from four shortlisted proposals.
The plan by Benedetti and Manders was selected first because Mark Manders is an outstanding and prominent artist, whose consistent way of working has led to an impressive oeuvre that will also attract considerable interest among the international field in Venice. The Benedetti and Manders plan is also visually strong: It has different layers and will bring a lot of special energy to the Rietveld Pavilion.
The proposed works by Manders collectively form a coherent whole, well representing the fantastic aspects of his oeuvre: installations, sculptures, offset print on paper, architectural interventions. All works combine a certain mystery with tremendous visual appeal. Manders’s 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 mysterious visual impact. Room with Broken Sentence demonstrates elements of Manders’s earlier work and the new steps that the artist is taking.
Lorenzo Benedetti, since 2008 director of the SBKM/De Vleeshal at Middelburg, is a curator who has demonstrated that he has a beautiful way of presenting works. It is clear that Mark Manders has every faith in him and that they inspire each other.
‘It’s fantastic to be able to represent the Netherlands in Venice and it is a great honour to be allowed to create an exhibition in Gerrit Rietveld’s beautiful pavilion.’—Lorenzo Benedetti
The Mondriaan Fund is responsible for the Dutch entry in the Venice Biennale. For this 55th edition, the Mondriaan Fund inaugurated an open call to curators to submit a brief plan suitable for this stately event. Birgit Donker, Director of the Mondriaan Fund, says: ‘The fact that 79 curators answered our call is fantastic and shows the great wealth of ideas in the Dutch contemporary art field.’ It demonstrates that this open call was effective. The jury members were Hester Alberdingk Thijm (Director of AkzoNobel Art Foundation), Defne Ayas (Director of the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam), Jan Debbaut (freelance curator and former Director of Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and Director of Collections at Tate Museums, London) and Rein Wolfs (Director of the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany).
For further information and images:
Mondriaan Fund, Caroline Soons: T +31 (0)20 523 15 23 / c.soons [at] mondriaanfonds.nl
