Mark Manders

At Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York, where Mark Manders is on view from April 30 through July 31, 2026, his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery unfolds like a sequence of thoughts that somehow became objects and then decided to stop moving. The exhibition brings together monumental bronze busts, abstract sculptural landscapes, paintings, and works on paper. Experienced together, these pieces form what the gallery aptly describes as a kind of scenography of the mind: dreamlike, fragmented, and theatrical, as if one were walking through a consciousness that had taken up spatial form and developed a taste for melancholy.

Manders has long built fictional worlds where time behaves badly. In his installations, past, present, and future tend to coexist; gravity is both obeyed and challenged; painting and sculpture keep wandering into each other’s territory; and language appears at once total and insufficient. One of the central works , Bonewhite Clay Head with Vertical-Cloud (2024-2025), presents a large-scale head that appears to be made of cracked white clay. The surface is striking precisely because it refuses easy placement: ancient, perhaps, but also oddly futuristic, or at least from some parallel civilization with better ceramics. Nearby sits Monument, a giant female head in painted bronze, carrying the same cracked white texture—one of Manders’ most lauded and, for some reason, always irresistible visual archetypes. A lump attached to the throat becomes the work’s emotional hinge. Manders made it as a monument to his mother, who lost a baby just after birth, and more broadly to those who have known grief that remained unspoken. The lump reads as language caught in transit—visible, undeniable, and unable to leave the body.

That bone-white surface runs through the exhibition as both a formal device and a conceptual thread. White, after all, performs its usual contradiction here: everything and nothing, full spectrum and blankness. Manders uses it in a series of paintings and wall works framed by his characteristic newspapers he made himself. Titled All Existing Words, these newspapers contain every existing English word, each used only once and arranged in random order. It is a wonderfully impossible gesture—total language reorganized into something unusable, exhaustive, and faintly absurd. Framed around sparse paintings like windows, the newspapers echo the old art historical idea of painting as a window onto the world, except here the windowsill appears to be made of language itself, or perhaps of its exhausted remains. Newspapers, too, bring their own temporal confusion: once the primary vehicle of the present, now halfway to relic. Elsewhere, paint and newspaper reappear in landscape-like constructions where Manders introduces blue. In Field Fragment, small tiles of blue in different shades represent the sky at different moments, balanced on a thin metal rod hovering over sand like a horizon line that has become strangely literal.

A series of smaller bronze busts, painted to resemble clay, extends this strange emotional and material logic through the rest of the gallery. Many are fragmentary—missing an ear, an arm, or portions of their surface—as if archaeological relics had been excavated from a civilization that never actually existed. That fictional status is crucial. Manders’s works often look ancient without belonging to history, damaged without being ruined, and solemn without becoming illustrative. They remain suspended in the ambiguous chronology that has long defined his practice. I was especially struck by the two Bonewhite Clay Torso works (2026), which briefly brought to mind Theo Viardin’s alien-like, anthropomorphic figures. It seems we are increasingly drawn to forms that are at once ancient and futuristic, as if searching for a way out of the present. Yet the present itself is hardly fixed ground. It is always bent by memory, grief, anticipation, and thought. In that sense, Manders is not offering another time so much as a way of entering more deeply into the subjective instability of this one.

For more information, please consult Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s website here →

Last Updated on May 4, 2026