MARCEL VAN EEDEN
when the big wackel hug came to town he shouted why is this town brown
03 June – 27 August, 2022
“Description”
The artistic work of Marcel van Eeden (b. 1965, Den Haag, NL) is part of a long-term project. The focus is on images and text that were created before his year of birth. He makes drawings based on images from newspapers and magazines from before he was born in 1965. In series that can include up to 150 drawings, he combines them into adventure stories about secret agents, art dealers, and stunning actresses. All drawings are based on images from sources such as travel books, postcards, art books, and magazines such as Life, Der Spiegel, and Paris Match. By using source images and real objects from the past, the artist questions our perception of fact and fiction, creating a „negative self-portrait“ composed of notes from a past that he himself could not have experienced. Marcel van Eeden’s work is an ongoing (and never completed) attempt to create a visual catalog of the world as it existed before 1965, which he considers as a way to „create a world that is against me“-a kind of negative self-portrait.
In his latest series of works he has been focusing on drawing on canvas. Images from the city of Zurich, the city where the artist has been living for the past 15 years, which he found in old magazines, travel books, archives and even personal photo albums, serve as the starting point of ‘when the big wackel hug came to town he shouted why is this town brown’. For the first time he includes color in his work on canvas, images which he found of advertisings in old magazines as color printing in that time was expensive and was reserved for advertising. From the colors one can tell that they derive from another time: the paper of old magazines has usually faded over time which is reflected in the color spectrum that the artist uses.
For the first time van Eeden is showing photographs, which will be included in his upcoming solo exhibitions at Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and Städtische Galerie, Karlsruhe later this year. In a printing technique from the 19th century called gum printing he creates photographs he took of his surroundings, places he traveled and people he met and prints them on the same paper that he has been using for his drawings. From afar they look like drawings yet at closer inspection we realize that the artist shows us an image of his time, a kind of positive self-portrait.
Marcel van Eeden was born in 1965 in Den Haag, NL, and studied painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in Den Haag. He lives and works in Zurich, Karlsruhe and Den Haag. His work has been shown at the 4th Berlin Biennale, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Albertina, Vienna, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk, Magasin 3, Stockholm, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; and is represented in many international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, US, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, US, Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, NL, Bundeskunstsammlung, Bonn, DE, Sammlung Goetz, DE, Burger Collection, HK. Upcoming exhibitions in 2022 include solo exhibitions at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and Städtische Galerie, Karlsruhe, among others.
