Jacqueline de Jong is a Dutch artist who was a key figure of the European post-war avantgarde movement. She is best known for her role in the Situationist International and the founding of The Situationist Times. Her diverse practice shifts from bold figuration to expressive abstraction, covering themes of sexual desire, violence, and war.
Read MoreDe Jong was born in the Dutch town of Hengelo. Her introduction to the art world started early. After studying art history in the 1950s, she began working at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as an assistant in the department of industrial design. She was introduced to a large network of artists, including German artists from the Gruppe SPUR and former members of CoBrA, an art movement whose working method focused on experimentation, spontaneity, and play. These principles shaped her work later on.
It was during this time that she became involved in the Situationist International, a leftist movement whose practice was meant to disrupt the consumerist mind of society. After leaving the group in 1962, de Jong began The Situationist Times in protest to the exclusion of artists by the extreme Situationists, led by Guy Debord. The English-language magazine covered a broad range of topics and was published six times between 1962 and 1967.
The publication reflects the artist's interest in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of knowledge that ultimately inform her varied artistic style across her decades-spanning career. Specific issues were dedicated to de Jong's fascination with topology, which, for her, embodied a type of controlled chaos. She viewed topologies as alternative forms of knowledge that functioned with, and not in opposition to, paradoxes and confusion. This is reflective in her paintings, which she uses to explore contradictions, boundaries, and misunderstandings.
De Jong's paintings from the early 1960s showcase a highly gestural style, defined by swathes of colour and heavy applications of paint. People, animals, and skeletons began to emerge from the canvas, combined with symbolic pictorial elements. Her artworks show influence from CoBrA, with their violent brushwork, vivid colours, and distorted figures, while also drawing elements from cinema, advertising, and popular culture.
During the 1970s, de Jong developed a comic book-like style that consisted of a work set up as a diptych in a suitcase. Measuring 50 by 50 centimetres, the artworks could be closed and carried anywhere. Text, handwritten in English, was inscribed on the left-hand side, while a painted image was situated on the other. These works, titled the 'Kroniek van Amsterdam' series, piece together seemingly mundane people and situations into a fragmented narrative.
Later paintings show de Jong's departure from a specific movement, as her colour palette grew lighter and she developed a balance between the playful and the absurd; realism and expressionism; figuration and abstraction. Her experimentation with the application of paint and continued interest in abstract, figural, and animal motifs show influence from artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Wassily Kandinsky, and Vieira da Silva.
Since the 2010s, de Jong's work has been inspired by old potatoes she found in the cellar of her house in France, which she uses to create installations, photographs, and paintings. She has returned to a dynamic expressionist state that recalls her works from the 1960s.
In 2019, de Jong was awarded The Outstanding Merit Prize, Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibitions (AWARE).
Jacqueline de Jong's website can be found here.
Gabrielle Leung | Ocula | 2021
