WIELS Centre d'Art Contemporain presents The Ultimate Kiss, a solo exhibition of the work of Jacqueline de Jong, running from 1 May to 15 August 2021.
Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong creates bold works that combine humour, eroticism, violence, and political commitment using her exuberant style and figuration. Since the early 1960s, De Jong has embraced the figurative image as a space for confusion and subversion. She belongs to a group of artists who reintroduced narration by borrowing elements from pop culture, cinema, and illustration-all the while mixing the absurd with the mysterious. With a penchant for experimentation, De Jong plays with shape, style, and pictorial idioms in order to unfold an idiosyncratic and subversive body of work.
Born in the Netherlands in 1939, de Jong travelled extensively across Europe coming into contact with many avant-garde movements. She was part, for instance, in the radical Situationist International group, whose intention was to put an end to the "Society of the Spectacle" and consumer culture. While active as a painter, she was also editor and graphic designer of The Situationist Times.
"Jacqueline de Jong's journey is nothing less than the journey of art through the second half of the twentieth century."
The exhibition at WIELS offers an occasion to discover or rediscover De Jong's prolific oeuvre via a non-linear presentation where works from different periods dialogue with one another, following a concept held dear to the artist: that of drifting.
A monograph encompassing the entirety of the artist's career (co-published by WIELS together with Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; MOSTYN, Llandudno, and Mercatorfonds, Brussels) will be available in the Bookshop and around the world.
The exhibition at WIELS was developed by Devrim Bayar (Curator, WIELS) and Xander Karskens (Director, De Ateliers, Amsterdam) in close dialogue with Jacqueline de Jong. The exhibition will travel to MOSTYN, Llandudno, Wales (UK) under the curatorship of Juliette Desorgues (Senior Curator, MOSTYN) and to the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg.
