Marcel van Eeden — The Hotel — In Situ Gallery, Fabienne Leclerc — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 29, 2012 → January 12, 2013

Around the installation The Lobby, the artist leads us in the footsteps of Oswald Sollman, the central protagonist of a story woven of images, photos, historical and/or invented figures, all taken from an enormous iconographic repertory before 1965. Transformed into a hotel lobby, the exhibition space will echo the very detailed drawings that trace the moments that preceded a dramatic event. The first part of a rapidly developing story, The Lobby will be followed by other episodes that Marcel van Eeden will present in 2013 in various venues and institutions around the world.

Since 1993, Marcel van Eeden has been attempting — like a reporter or archeologist — to build a singular iconography by carefully choosing his sources from old newspapers, magazine, history books, textbooks, photographic collections and postcards. A storehouse of chaotic stories, snatched from their original context and resuscitated by the artist’s compulsive recycling, this visual universe seems affected by a radical form of image collecting, an irrepressible thirst for consuming these images that paradoxically, once quenched, can save them from oblivion.

The artist does not settle for simply reproducing powerful illustrations or old images. He tries to draw every photographic image preceding his birth, everything that happened in a nebulous zone that extends from the start of the twentieth century to 1965, the year he was born. All those people walking in the street or sitting in cafés and restaurants, those cars, trams and buses, those explosions… all those signs of life that enliven Marcel van Eeden’s drawings belong to the past, and are lost in the mists of a very private prehistory.

There is something monastic, even religious in Marcel van Eeden’s meticulous obstinacy; his practice is similar to the votive exercise, and exists in a rigorous line of conceptual art — Roman Opalka’s projects or Gerhard Richter’s Atlas come to mind.

Born in The Hague, he lives and works in this city as well as in Zurich and Berlin. Winner of the 2011 Guerlain prize, his works were presented, among others, at the MoMA in New York in 2011and the ZKM in Karlsruhe in 2012.