Jacqueline De Jong

Born in 1939 in Hengelo (Netherlands).

This first French retrospective of Jacqueline de Jong's work offers a pano- rama of her creation starting from her paintings and engravings in the 1960's, her affiliation with the Situationist International, her role as publisher of The Situationist Times and her participation in the events of May 1968 up to her more recent works – paintings, books or jewellery.

The exhibition reveals the richness of her artistic history as well as her life. Jacqueline de Jong was born to a Jewish family in 1939 and was forced to flee the country faced with Nazism. After theatre lessons in London she worked with Willem Sandbery at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Her encounter with the members of CoBrA and the Situationist International at the Stedelijk Museum marked her artistic début. In 1962 she founded The Situationist Times – the movement's only English-speaking journal – practised engraving and painting in Paris and took part in the May '68 protest in the French capital. Living through the avant-garde of the 1960's with freedom, disobedience and commitment as for her return to painting in the 1980's, Jacqueline de Jong's painting is figurative and expressionist. It borrows from mundane objects – windbreaks, mirrors or suitcases – as much as it plays on a bestiary that is at at the same time monstrous and naïve, combining eroticism, violence and humour. Since the 2000's the artist shares her time between Holland and the French countryside, creating books and paintings whose motif is potatoes. She also transforms them into jewellery after having harvested, dried and plunged them into gold.
 

Besides the acquisition of her archives by Yale University in 2011, Jacqueline de Jong's work has recently been shown in monographic exhibitions (Cobra Museum for Contemporary Art, Amstelveen, 2003; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2012) as well as in group shows (Musée Tinguely, Bâle, 2007; Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris, 2013; Blume and Poe, Los Angeles, 2015; Château Shatto, Los Angeles, 2017) as has her jewellery (Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2016; Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, 2018). In 2019 her body of work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum a Amsterdam.

Born in Hengelo (Holland) in 1939 she lives and works in Amsterdam.