Marcel van Eeden: K.M. Wiegand

The Dutch artist Marcel van Eeden has done a drawing a day for more than a decade, since 1993. Each one interprets photographs or text from before he was born in 1965, source material he gathers through a network of vintage book dealers, archives and libraries. His thousands of small-format works show people and places at once anachronistic and ready to spring to life at any moment; they make the time before his birth seem present in front of the viewer's eyes, as though through the looking glass into a period film. Van Eeden calls his life's work an "encyclopedia" of his death--he imagines a time before he existed in order to imagine a time after he is gone. This collection of approximately 140 of his virtuosic drawings describes a fictitious biography for K. M. Wiegand, who, history verifies, was actually a botanist.