Baloise Art Forum: Marcel van Eeden

The Sollmann Collection

The exhibition "The Sollmann Collection" at the Baloise Art Forum shows new acquisitions of Marcel van Eeden at the Baloise Group Art Collection from 16 June until 29 October 2010. The exhibition will be open to the public Mondays to Fridays, 8 am to 6 pm. Background information on the artists and work will be available.

Marcel van Eeden's artistic work has been abiding by special rules for over fifteen years now. Having imposed these rules upon himself, he produces at least one drawing a day. He preferably does so with an oil-based Nero pencil on hand-made paper (size: 19 x 28 cm); the small-format, nuanced black-and-white drawings all have the same frames.

The exterior uniformity and reticence of these works allow for a variety of curious images. On the one hand, these consist of rural idyllic scenes, war zones or crime scenes, on the other hand they show metropolitan architecture, residential streets and vehicles at night and cartoons and text fragments.

Each of these presentations is based on a photograph from the artist's archive (consisting of books, magazines, advertising brochures etc.) created before 22 November 1965. This is another one of his artistic rules: he only uses photographs dating back to before his birth. On the basis of these specifications, several thousand drawings have been created.

In 2004 van Eeden started to compile groups of up to 150 drawings into series and has done so ever since. They all recount episodes from the lives of four people being figments of van Eeden’s vivid imagination; K. M. Wiegand, Celia Coplestone, Matheus Boryna and Oswald Sollmann.

Showing similarities to the characters in a trashy novel, these four protagonists undergo amazing adventures illustrated in image sequences.Ultimately, these remain inscrutable for the beholder. The result consists of both fascinating and mysterious drawings oscillating between taxing the senses and being devoid of meaning.

This exhibition is about the archaeologist and cosmopolitan Oswald Sollmann. He studied medicine and archaeology in The Netherlands and worked at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin from where he travelled to India, Somalia, Marrakech, Istanbul and Zurich. In a 2008/09 series, Celia Coplestone also accuses Sollmann of having murdered Matheus Boryna. The exhibition is the first to provide a glimpse of the private art collection of Sollmann. It shows his preference for Dutch landscape painting of the 17th century.

The reproductions of his paintings are all covered with numbers, writing and symbols. The characters can be itemized – some refer to the status of the planets on 22 November 1948, to the train schedule from Thalwil (Switzerland) in the same year or to the logos of well-known commercial products. This way, however,they give the impression of foreign bodies. As such they indicate that Oswald Sollmann also had a propensity to occultism. In this most recent block of work van Eeden once again pursues a tricky game of symbols and modern myths.

Martin Schwander

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	The exterior uniformity and reticence of these works allow for a variety of curious images. On the one hand, these consist of rural idyllic scenes, war zones or crime scenes, on the other hand they show metropolitan architecture, residential streets and vehicles at night and cartoons and text fragments.


Each of these presentations is based on a photograph from the artist's archive (consisting of books, magazines, advertising brochures etc.) created before 22 November 1965. This is another one of his artistic rules: he only uses photographs dating back to before his birth. On the basis of these specifications, several thousand drawings have been created.


	In 2004 van Eeden started to compile groups of up to 150 drawings into series and has done so ever since. They all recount episodes from the lives of four people being figments of van Eeden’s vivid imagination; K. M. Wiegand, Celia Coplestone, Matheus Boryna and Oswald Sollmann.


Showing similarities to the characters in a trashy novel, these four protagonists undergo amazing adventures illustrated in image sequences.Ultimately, these remain inscrutable for the beholder. The result consists of both fascinating and mysterious drawings oscillating between taxing the senses and being devoid of meaning.