Mark Manders – interview

London Mithraeum is the perfect space for Manders’ three new yet timeless works. Before the opening of his first public exhibition in the UK, the artist talks about time, language and the human mind, and how wanting to become a writer led to his art practice

Room with All Existing Words, like most of Mark Manders’ work, suggests a totality while looking minimal. Ever since the Dutch artist decided more than 40 years ago, age 16, that he wanted to become a “writer with objects”, he has been slowly and steadily building a body of artworks that hasn’t changed much over time. Manders sees his life’s work, which hovers between the past, the present and the future, as one whole, referring to his oeuvre as a “self-portrait as a building”. He allows us, the viewers, to wander into his mental space, like an abstract installation of the human mind.

The Roman Temple of Mithras, 240 CE, London Mithraeum Bloomberg Space. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

London Mithraeum is the perfect site for Manders’ work: the ancient temple, dedicated to the cult of Mithraeus, now hidden under the layers of time and the very material of the city. Manders is showing only three works, and each one seems to levitate, honouring the building below ground. A giant androgyne head is intersected with vertical constructs as if encased in a building. Manders explains that he was thinking of the 1920s, the years of De Stijl. The vertical slats around the head are slightly raised and so are the two postcards floating above a concrete slab, images of a sculpture by the artist, an amalgamated creature between human and an animal. A newspaper is draped over a pole sticking out of the wall, Dali-like; it contains all the words in the English dictionary. These works constitute an attempt by the artist to visualise the invisible: the form that language takes in our minds.

Mark Manders: Room with All Existing Words, installation view, London Mithraeum Bloomberg Space, 22 January – 4 July 2026. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

Interested in human feats as much as in human failures, Manders accomplishes artworks that are timeless, but at the same time look as if they were abandoned in the artist’s studio only a minute ago. Manders is interested in the “frozen moment”. When a sculpture is about to fall apart, he casts it in bronze, then paints it to look like unfinished clay, chasing stillness in the constant flux of life.

Mark Manders: Room with All Existing Words, installation view, London Mithraeum Bloomberg Space, 22 January – 4 July 2026. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

Manders’ giant heads recur throughout the years; often alone, and sometimes in groups. The intersecting verticals suggest a fragmentation: in the human mind, in language, and in time. Manders considers them not as portraits but as objects, free from constraints of time, race and gender. Instead, they convey a generic notion of what constitutes a “human” in the human mind, just as his newspaper doesn’t show a specific sample, but a visualisation of language itself. Manders likes words and objects to take on lives of their own; creating an entire fictional world around just one word (“skiapod”) and using human gestures to suggest an aliveness and emotion in his objects. Notions of consciousness and objecthood are constantly subverted, creating that sense of familiarity and strangeness that arises from all his works.

Room with All Existing Words is Mark Manders’ first public exhibition in the UK, following on the back of his retrospective Mindstudy at Voorlinden, the Dutch museum founded by collector Joop van Caldeborgh.

Studio International speaks to Manders a few days before the opening.

Mark Manders: Room with All Existing Words
London Mithraeum Bloomberg Space
22 January – 4 July 2026

Interview by SABINE CASPARIE
Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY