Events/Openings

Gallery Jordan/Seydoux—Drawings & Prints is pleased to present the solo exhibition SCRATCH! featuring works by the Rotterdam-based artist Paul van der Eerden. The show will run from January 25th to March 2nd, 2013 with the artist in attendance at the opening. 

Van der Eerden speaks but one language: drawing. Working exclusively with graphite, colored pencils and occasionally ink, he limits his works to small sheets of paper rarely larger than A3. This deliberate selection of media is all he requires to engage a wide range of themes: abstraction, onomatopoeia, sexuality, representation, dreams, reality. 

He takes his cues from the inherent tragedy of living, that is from its absurdities and the fundamental violence implicit in human relations. They come up and come up heavily within this works, finding their bodies in stilted figures who either exist only within their own imagined universes or engage with one another by way of obscure violence or desensualized sexual acts. Paul van der Eerden never allows his audience to find solace in the spaces he creates—it is not an art of pleasure. Existential oppression is clear to him, and in his attempts to distill and present it, he ensures that the anxieties—those part and parcel of modern living; omnipresent; inescapable—cannot be defused or rendered impotent. They can instead be made bearable. A most fundamental component of the artist’s work is an unmistakable undercurrent of humor, which serves at once as a leavening agent, giving a much needed air to van der Eerden’s weighty subjects, and by establishing a marked contrast by which his focus sharpens. 

Recently, in 2010, van der Eerden created a series of 54 drawings to accompany Shakespeare’s tragedy, "Macbeth". Aspiring to more than simple narrative illustrations, these drawings instead reflect the themes of the play with which the artist is also most intimately engaged: fate, power, ambition—namely, the darkest potentials of human nature. 

Paul van der Eerden was born in Rotterdam in 1954 where he currently lives and works. His art has been exhibited widely throughout Europe. Aside from his drawing, he also works as a curator and has led exhibitions in a number of cities, notably Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Paris. His artwork can also be found at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Bibliothèque nationale de France Paris and the M.N.A.M. Centre Pompidou Paris, as well as numerous other public and private collections. The "Macbeth" series was exhibited recently by Gallery Bernard Jordan in Paris (2012) and before then at A.VE.NU.DE.JET.TE in Brussels (2011).

A catalogue of his works titled "Dust For Sparrows" appeared in 2009 and a new one containing the "Macbeth" series has just been released.

SCRATCH! will exhibit van der Eerden’s work spanning the last two years.