SINT-MARTENS-LATEM.- The Absence of Mark Manders unfolds in the Woning Van Wassenhove. This is a post-Brutalist house for a bachelor designed by Juliaan Lampens in 1974. In jarring contrast to prevailing depictions of clean and mostly empty Brutalist interiors, the original occupant, Albert Van Wassenhove, who lived there until his passing in 2012, stuffed the house to hoarder-like proportions. The Absence of Mark Manders treats Lampens’s architecture with the dignity of the permanent sculpture that it is, while also putting forth Van Wassenhove’s logic of accumulation. Although Manders has hardly touched some spaces, he treats the bed, office, and kitchen as stages for aggregation in line with the original occupant’s mindset: drawings, architectural proposals, photographs, artworks, paint pots, and seemingly wet clay are piled on top of one another. These spaces have been used as an artist’s studio, unveiling traces of a temporary occupant living in, and thinking with, Lampens’s architecture.

“The aim is to show the house in a perfect situation. While some spaces derail when you zoom in on them, there is a kaleidoscopic element to them, as if you are looking inside a head.” —Mark Manders

Mark Manders (1968, lives and works in Ronse, BE) was trained at the Grafische School and the ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, both in Arnhem, Netherlands. Since 1986 Manders has been working on the ongoing project Self-Portrait as a Building. The idea for this monumental, self-searching project took root when the artist created Inhabited for a Survey (First Floor Plan from Self-Portrait as a Building) (1986) – a fictional floor plan – formed by writing implements that were on Manders’ desk at the time of the sculpture’s creation.

By continually recycling, modifying, and creating new arrangements of favoured configurations and objects– human figures, animals, furniture, and architectural elements – Manders expands the limits of this decades-long conceptual self-portrait.

Recent solo exhibitions of Mark Manders include The Absence of Mark Manders, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (2021); Michaël Borremans & Mark Manders: Double Silence, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2020-2021). The Absence of Mark Manders, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands (2020); Silent Studio, Kistefos Museum, Norway (2020).

Other solo exhibitions include Mark Manders: Parallel Occurrences/ Documented Assignments (Hammer Museum, Aspen Art Museum, Walker Art Center, Dallas Museum of Art, 2010- 2012); Two Interconnected Houses, La Casa Luis Barragân, Mexico City (2011); The Absence of Mark Manders, which opened at Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2007), and travelled to S.M.A.K., Ghent, Kunsthaus Zurich, and to Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2009); Art Institute of Chicago and Renaissance Society, Chicago (2003).

Manders represented the Netherlands at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.

Woning Van Wassenhove is a house designed by Juliaan Lampens (1926–2019), built between 1972 and 1974. Albert Van Wassenhove, who commissioned the house, was a teacher with a passion for contemporary art and architecture. Lampens designed a house of concrete, wood and glass in which all living areas overlap as one open space. The warmth of the wood and the ever-changing play of incident light shatter the massiveness of the concrete. Basic geometric shapes structure the interior: the sleeping area is a circle, the kitchen is a triangle and the office space is a square. But the house is more than just a game of shapes and lines as it manages to redefine our experience of living.

After Van Wassenhove’s death in 2012, the house was bequeathed to Ghent University, which in turn entrusted it on long-term loan to Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens. opens and activates the house through visits, exhibitions and residencies for artists. The house was renovated in 2015 thanks to the support of Philippe and Miene Gillion. In September 2017, Woning Van Wassenhove was officially listed as a monument. The house is part of the international Iconic Houses Network.

Woning Van Wassenhove
Mark Manders: The Absence of Mark Manders
September 20th, 2023 - November 19th, 2023
Artist Talk
Mark Manders & Angelique Kampens October 7th, 2023 at 11:00 AM