Twenty-five years ago Marcel van Eeden (1965) had his first exhibition at Galerie Maurits van de Laar. During that solo exhibition, the outlines of his work started to take shape: cataloguing the time before 1965, the year of his birth. By drawing from photographic material from books and newspapers, he began appropriating that time like an archivist, a project impossible to ever complete, if only because of the infinite number of available images. Undaunted by this prospect, Van Eeden started to draw in his virtuoso style, building an impressive oeuvre that keeps expanding to this day. Around 2004, an element of fiction started to appear in his work when he introduced characters like Wiegand and Sollman for the purpose of weaving an increasingly intricate plot.
The exhibition to celebrate the twenty-five-year collaboration with Marcel van Eeden includes a retrospective of works that over the years were sold through the gallery, as well as new drawings.
A small publication with texts by buyers, curators and journalists who describe their first encounter with Van Eeden’s work, will accompany the exhibition.
In the words of one of the contributors, Hans den Hartog Jager: “In Van Eeden’s work subjectivity clashes maximally with existing reality, objectivity punches with great force on to the personal sphere.”