Mark Manders
“Writing Yellow”
New York, 521 West 21st Street #1
For the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, Manders presents a variety of sculptural works that continue his “self portrait as a building”– an ongoing investigation into self-portraiture, architecture, language, and perception. The gallery exhibition coincides with Manders’ monumental Public Art Fund commission, currently on view at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park.
Throughout his influential practice, Manders has written a continuous sculptural autobiography through objects and architecture. Over the past three decades the artist has developed a cohesive body of work that exists in its own realm, independent of a clear narrative or chronology. Language plays a defining role in Manders’ practice; in a recent interview he explained, “I wanted to be a writer, but I became more fascinated with objects—how they relate to language and thinking. Instead of writing with words, I started to write with objects. I wanted to create a language out of them…” Writing Yellow sees Manders continue his original ambition to be a writer and aims towards a broader premise in which his works engage in a continuous dialogue with one another. In Writing Yellow, the artist’s latest literary and sculptural undertaking is filtered through the use of a single color: yellow.
Operating under the theory that the conception and measurement of time arose with language, the artist uses words and visual codes to dislodge our spatial and temporal senses. His work constructs a timeless reality wherein contradictions co-exist: the past and the future, the temporary and the permanent, the beautiful and the grotesque, the tender and the brutal. In choosing the term yellow, Manders alludes to the multitudes that language may contain; thus yellow can convey a range of associations, feelings and memories. For instance, looking at Van Gogh's sunflower paintings and the particular yellow that the artist chose - a specific shade that Manders describes as warm yet almost poisonous. And so, yellow offers itself as a chameleon-like construct to be transformed by the artist to communicate an endless variety of emotions.
on view through May 24, 2019
