Marcel van Eeden


Marcel van Eeden is a Dutch draftsman and painter. From 1989 to 1993 van Eeden studied painting at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Van Eeden lives and works in Zurich and The Hague. Characteristically, van Eeden's work is reminiscent of the film-noir period, of almost photo-realistic depictions and he manipulates the use of the black and white contrast. A wider audience was introduced to his work after his contribution to the Berlin Biennale in 2006.

Works

Marcel van Eeden is primarily recognised for his drawings, for which he mainly works with charcoal pencils, however he also uses coloured pencils or water-colour paint. The majority of the drawings have a 19 cm x 28 cm / 7,5" x 11" format. Van Eeden produced a drawing everyday from 2001–2007, which he published daily onto his blog. In 2007, he concluded the blog and returned for the first time since his studies to painting, however he does continue to draw. Van Eeden's paintings, as well as his drawings, utilise a variety of templates, which are all taken from the years before his date of birth, 1965. Van Eeden calls this project "The Encyclopedia of my Death". The templates include photographs, exhibition catalogues, newspaper clippings, magazines and illustrations or even cloth patterns. Many of the works show nocturnal urban scenes, fires, abstract shapes and patterns as well as short excerpts of stencilled texts. By focussing on the virtually infinite time span before his birth, van Eeden accepts his own existence as a merely insignificant part of a genuine time stream and discards the finiteness of his own existence.
Van Eeden assembles both his paintings and drawings in the same manner; in both mediums, he pursues a picturesque approach and focuses more on the images' grey tonal composition rather than the line. In this respect, he compares his work to the pastel chalk drawings of Edgar Degas.
In 2004/2005 van Eeden began to group his drawings together to form different sized series. This was inspired, amongst other things, by Robert Walser's „Spaziergang“ text which extended over a collection of drawings or constantly recurring characters.
The first great series to emerge from this modus was the 150 piece series „K. M. Wiegand. Life and Work“, 2006. K. M. Wiegand is a real historical botanist, whose biography can be found cited as short passages of text on the drawings. Through the combination of images, which do not necessarily have anything to do with the particular passages of text, van Eeden constructs a fictional biography for the botanist. This approach was recycled in later series', such as „Celia“, 2004–2006 and „The Archeologist. The Travels of Oswald Sollmann“, 2007 and „The death of Matheus Boryna“, 2007. The protagonists of these series', K.M. Wiegand, Celia Copplestone, Oswald Sollmann and Matheus Boryna, are featured together in the work „Witness for the prosecution“, in 2008.

Solo exhibitions