Patrick Van Caeckenbergh (b. 1960, Aalst, Belgium) works across multiple media, often combining sculpture, drawing, and collage in a systematic collection and classification of images and information. His work is the result of years of dedicated research that draws on his extensive library of scientific diagrams, religious stories, fairy tales, and literary texts.

In his work, Van Caeckenbergh explores the study of specific scientific fields, using taxonomy, cartography, genealogy, cosmology, and other classification systems to organise his ideas and studies. Each project is conceived as a visual articulation of interconnected information that he has gathered through this intensive research.

For his 2015 exhibition with Lehmann Maupin, Van Caeckenbergh premiered his series Drawing of Old Trees during Wintry Days, which he developed continuously over the course of seven years. Although the drawings are entirely fictional, the artist renders each one with such precision and detail that they appear photorealistic. While the trees are mere figments of the artist’s vivid imagination, his methodical classification and painstaking attention to detail contribute to the project’s false sense of realism.

Van Caeckenbergh often playfully combines the information he finds with his own interpretations, thereby creating new stories based on his encyclopaedic methodology.