LOS ANGELES, CALIF.- Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is presenting 'Mark Manders: Writing Skiapod', on view at the gallery’s Los Angeles location from February 11 - April 8, 2023. The artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery, this is Manders' first solo exhibition in Los Angeles since his 2010 solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum, which also traveled to the Walker Art Center, the Aspen Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art.

Throughout his decades long practice, Mark Manders has created an expanding but timeless architectural space whose arrangement is constantly being rebuilt and transformed, rooms populated and reimagined, in an ongoing project that extends beyond the artist's own subjectivity of the present moment. This imagined framework, wherein all of the artist’s sculptures and rooms belong, has a non-linear narrative where contradictions co-exist: the ancient and the future, the temporary and the permanent, the beautiful and the grotesque, reality and fantasy. Long interested in language and the written word, each object Manders conceives of can be thought of as words in dialogue, forming abstract sentences. Similar to the words in a dictionary, they are linked together in one moment, frozen in time. Manders gives physical form to a dreamlike psychological space where each object is rendered with subtle alteration of scale and material.




“Painting,” less as a practice and more as a concept, a word to be manipulated and subverted, serves as a foundational thread in this exhibition. In Composition with Two Painted Heads and Composition with Painted Head, the portrait bust reemerges among Manders’ essential archetypal forms, but here the object is presented as canvas. The canvas heads are tinted with a sky blue pigment the artist has employed throughout his practice to suggest the sky in a landscape from Vermeer or Mondrian or Van Gogh. In Painted Head a head is sandwiched between vertical elements that upon closer inspection are revealed as small stretched canvases. Juxtapositions of objects and materials inherent to an artist’s studio are employed in a way that subverts the traditional definition of media, or crosses genres, presenting objects that exist simultaneously as painting, poem, sculpture, and text.

Early in his practice, Manders created his Notional Newspapers, and he has recently completed his project to include every word in the English language—used only once and placed in random order. Rather than using real newspapers in his work, these non-sensical fragments have no connection to a specific place or time. Further, the newspapers' traditional purpose as a carrier of language and meaning is undermined and the material is repeatedly transformed. The newspaper becomes a canvas for paintings, a wedge to angle a sculpture, a pillar set upon baked earth in a landscape, or a stacked into a block beneath the head of a dog-like form. The dog is among the artist’s earliest iconic sculptural forms, and as such, the newspaper block serves almost as if a time traveling-device, bringing an image from the distant past into the contemporary moment.

A surreal and immersive installation entitled, Room with All Existing Words, gives form to a mythical narrative built from artifacts and source material of intentionally questionable authenticity. In this installation, Manders has has constructed an entire narrative and history around the word 'skiapod' (Greek for ‘shadow foot’), an ancient creature who uses its giant foot to shelter from the sun. Fascinated by the fact that people once believed these creatures existed, Manders explores the intricacies of the human mind and how it is capable of inventing such fantasies. When entering the room, Manders entire set of Notional Newspapers hangs from the ceiling. Riddled with historical context on the skiapod, the information presented is so well documented it leaves the viewer to question what is true and what is fantasy. Starting with the few known images of this mysterious creature, Manders created numerous references and art historical links to the mythological figure. By creating this fictional narrative and weaving it into threads of reality, the artists shows how our minds adapt to misleading information.

Inspired by the psychology of fake news and the propaganda created to construct a new reality, Manders has created his own fake Wikipedia page, which can be accessed via QR code in the exhibition or seen here: https://www.markmanders.com/wikipedia-skiapode