JACQUELINE DE JONG
Imaginary Disobedience
March 18 – May 06, 2017
Opening reception on Saturday, March 18
6–9pm
Jacqueline de Jong (born 1939, Hengelo, Netherlands) is a Dutch artist whose painting, sculpture and publishing endeavors have spanned over five decades.
Château Shatto will open our first solo exhibition with Jacqueline de Jong on Saturday, March 18. Imaginary Disobedience is the artist’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles and will comprise works from 1960 through 2015.
De Jong’s early work connects with several touchstones of the 20th century avant-garde. She established a deep involvement with the Situationist International and consequently became the publisher and editor of the Situationist Times from 1962 to 1967. As editor of the experimental and ideologically-forceful publishing platform, de Jong established her voice as a percipient contributor to political action and visual language.
In this role, de Jong brought the work of many artists to the pages of the Situationist Times, including Asger Jorn, Pierre Alechinsky and Gruppe SPUR. Her enduring involvement and collaborations with Jorn align de Jong’s work from this period with the legacy of CoBrA. While there is a clear thread and shared impulses between the work of CoBrA artists and de Jong, this is just one property of a practice that continues to be vital and experimental today.
De Jong’s output has been vast, yet she often returns to visions that blur human behavior with animal tendencies, where the ostensibly clear line that demarcates our humanity is rendered untidy. Eroticism, desire, violence and humor often participate in the same scenarios in her paintings. In de Jong’s more recent sculptures, the humble subject of the potato is revered for its quiet formal qualities and for each unique form that is sculpted by the earth that rears it.
Imaginary Disobedience will focus on works that define her major contributions. This includes de Jong’s inventive re-imaginings of the format of paintings; her chronicling of highly visible global events against her own wandering interiority; narrative tableaus; and a seamless blending of the intellectual and libidinal.
Jacqueline de Jong has presented solo exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2012); Yale University Beinecke Rare Books and manuscripts library, New Haven (2012); Museum Freriks, Winterswijk, (2010); and the Cobra Museum for Contemporary Art, Amstelveen, (2003). She has exhibited work at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2015); Museum Hurrle, Durbach (2014); Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (2013); Danmarks Industriemuseum, Horsens (2009); Museum Tinguely, Basel (2007); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2003); Museo d’Arte Moderne, Lugano (2002); Museum KSL, Vienna (1997); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Barcelona (1996); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1994); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1989); and the ICA London (1989). Her work is held in the following museums and public collections: Stedelijk Museum; Cobra Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Amstelveen; Museum Arnhem; KunstMuseum Silkeborg; Sonja Henny Niels Onstadt Centeret, Oslo; Kunstmuseum Göteborg; Kunstmuseum Halmstadt; Museo Communale di Ascona; Städtische Galerie im Lenbach Haus Munich; Erotic Art Museum (Kronhausen) Hamburg; MCCA Toronto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bibliothèque Nationale de France BNF, Paris; Geld Museum, Utrecht.