When you trace a ... photo, you are in that photo, so to speak, you are walking around in it. ... By trying to study it as precisely as possible, ... you also come very close to the moment in which the photo was taken. You can almost hear the people depicted talking to each other [...]." (Marcel van Eeden)

Like hardly anyone else in contemporary art, Marcel van Eeden gives the medium of drawing cinematic qualities, opening a window into a very vividly portrayed past. Based on photographs from magazines, newspapers, books and catalogues, all printed before his birth in 1965, he explores a time that took place without him, but into which he puts himself and literally ?draws?.

In several groups of drawings, Marcel van Eeden takes us into the past of his adopted home of Zurich, which we explore as if on a city walk - from the modern Bellevue tram stop past the Polybähnli, across Lake Zurich to Picabia and Miró in the Kronenhalle. In the style of pulp fiction, he develops a highly exciting story about cultural loot and Eduard von der Heydt's world art collection, which was to form the basis of the Zurich Rietberg Museum.

Marcel van Eeden sometimes weaves individual narrative strands and figures from his series of drawings together. They can be read as parts of a graphic cosmos that is aesthetically reminiscent of early graphic novels or scenes from film noir. In this world we repeatedly encounter Oswald Sollmann, the mysterious archaeologist, assassin, spy, famous writer ? and alter ego of the artist.

The exhibition presents a selection of drawings from the last 25 years from the Gerhard Theewen Collection in Cologne, supplemented by other loans and a rarely shown series of animations in which van Eeden brings Oswald Sollmann's famous show with chops whirling acrobatically through the air and smoking ghostly to life.


Museum Morsbroich
Gustav-Heinemann-Str. 80
51377 Leverkusen

More informations here.