MOSTYN are to present the first UK institutional solo exhibition of Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong, one of the crucial artistic figures from the post-war years of protest and revolt.
Born in the Netherlands in 1939, De Jong is a key figure of the European post-war avant-garde with a career spanning half a century. Her role in the Situationist International marked her early years in Paris in the 1960s, where she was actively involved in the student protests of May 1968. In parallel to her work as an editor and designer – most notably for The Situationist Times, which she founded and published from 1962 until 1967 – De Jong has developed a unique painterly practice. In its spontaneity, De Jong’s expressive, often grotesque and excessive style follows the anti-academic and non-conformist aesthetic of the avant-garde.
Playfully moving between styles and painterly idioms throughout her career, the artist displays a voracious interest in the painted image as a site for confusion and subversion. She belongs to a group of artists who reintroduced narration by borrowing elements from popular 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. Expressive yet realistic, her work exhibits uninhibited eroticism and sexual liberation.
The exhibition at MOSTYN is the first public presentation of De Jong’s prolific and provocative oeuvre in the UK via a non-linear presentation where works from different periods dialogue with one another, following the Situationist concept of the dérive (drift).
