Mark Cloet (Ostend - Belgium, 1964) finished his studies of Monumental Arts at the KASK in Ghent in 1989. He obtained his Master's Degree supervised by Mr. Claude Vialat of the Ecole d'Art de Nimes and by Mr. Richard Bacquet of the Art Academy of Marseille, France.
He received an honorary doctorate at the Universita degli Studi di Semantologia di Padova, Italy, and the P. P. Pasolini Award "because of his artistic, social and political autonomy, his semiotic studies of plastic art and his applications of this in social and artistic passion." From then there was no end to his academic and artistic research. In 2011 Cloet received a Fulbright Sir Award, and was rewarded with a one-year- residency, beginning in August 2011, as artist, semantologist and philosopher at the UTP A Edinburgh in Texas, USA, his stay prolonged for a 2 years more.

Mark Cloet is an artist who works silently, steadily creating works that serve what may be called the contemplative arts. This places him in a rather exceptional position. While his work may be considered as rather hermetic, he is omnipresent on the professional art platform as an art critic, he takes social initiatives, and actively participates in the discourse of what the arts can still bring to the dystopia of our times. Primarily a sculptor, Cloet also directed an international center of art in Belgium.

His work always responds to the subcutaneous tension that sculpture is capable of provoking. His sculptures always carry the sign of imperfection, or traces of their creation. They are the mysterious bearers of their own shape and matter in a space which questions the unconditional ratios, opposes aesthetic evidence and, by doing so, questions ethics every time.

Cloet says that "the object of an artwork" is not the summary of its creator, but of the image itself. The material and presence, what it surrounds it and the unsightly relativity of the proportions compared to those of the universe, all speak to the reality of the image. They incorporate an illusion of the righteous and vulnerable in their shape and presence. His objects, seen as small (however monumental sometimes), new and unlikely modest ate historical realities that bear a strong and self-reliant potential, primarily because of their relativity, their inviolability and their ability to be eternally reinterpreted.

Besides al this Cloet is well known for his way of working with different people, his impact as catalyzer and creator of mutual understanding is from high standing level. There for he was invited for most complex and different projects the most difficult places all over the world.

Susan Fitzsimmons
Chair of the Art Faculty UTP A University of Texas Pan American