Marc Mulders

The oeuvre of Marc Mulders is determined by what may very well be the great theme in the history of art: the endless cycle of life and death. The expression of living and dying, death and resurrection, has long held a central place in Western painting, and the young Marc Mulders deliberately situated himself in the midst of that tradition. In series of paintings he developed these themes and explored their pictorial potential. His way of doing this is by no means objective or purely observational, but extremely engaged and charged with meaning. Painting is a form of immersion for Mulders, and his expressive, thickly painted canvases are the results of his grappling with the subjects as well as with the matter into which he transforms them. For his ultimate concern is that the cycle of life and death continues in the painting: that the paint, as dead matter, becomes a living image.