The Dutch painter and sculptor Jacqueline de Jong, who was closely associated with the Situationist International organisation, has died.
De Jong experimented with a variety of styles over her six decade career, from Pop art to realism, though always with an eye to social commentary.
Recent paintings, including those shown in La petite mort, her current exhibition at London’s Pippy Houldsworth Gallery (through 10 July), saw her return to ‘macabre figuration’, vibrantly-coloured scenes featuring eroticism and violence with the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza among the subject matter.
Born in the Dutch city of Hengelo, de Jong fled war in 1942 to Zurich with her Swiss Jewish mother. On her return to the Netherlands, aged 19, she started working part time at the Stedelijk Museum and through the milieu of Amsterdam’s art scene she became involved in the radical-left Situationist International, facilitating another move, this time to Paris.
She was to fall out with SI leader Guy Debord however and departed the group in 1962. She then initiating The Situationist Times newspaper, six issues of which she produced with a printing press installed in the apartment she shared with her partner, the Danish artist Asger Jorn.
Complimenting her activism – including printing pamphlets for the 1968 student uprising in Paris – de Jong’s paintings and sculpture became influenced by the CoBrA avant-garde art movement, embarking on two new series, Accidental Paintings and Suicidal Paintings. While the works of the 1960s, and the more straight-figuration of the 1970s, imbued everyday scenes with violence, by the 1980s de Jong became preoccupied with the subject of war.
The Ultimate Kiss, a survey of her work, traveled to venues across Europe from 2021 to 2022, including WIELS Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brussels; Mostyn, Wales; and Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Germany. In 2021, Ortuzar Projects organised her first solo show in New York in over fifty years and in November, a solo exhibition de Jong’s work will be held at the NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale.
