Jacqueline de Jong. Disobedience
September 23, 2025 - March 22, 2026
The Kunstmuseum St.Gallen presents the first retrospective in Switzerland of the recently deceased Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong (born in Hengelo, the Netherlands in 1939; died in Amsterdam in 2024). The exhibition brings together an oeuvre of painting, sculpture and graphic art produced in dialogue with some of the most important post-war artistic movements in Europe - including art brut, Pop Art, New Figuration and Postmodernism. Aged 21, De Jong became already involved in the revolutionary, radical avant-garde movement the Situationist International. Throughout her career, De Jong stayed true to this spirit. Her shapeshifting and oftentimes politically engaged work was playful, erotic, funny, dark and - above all - always radically contemporary, oriented towards the world.
Impressions
The Artist
Jacqueline de Jong
Jacqueline de Jong was born in 1939 in Hengelo, a small city in the Netherlands, close to the German border. After her Swiss mother fled with her to Switzerland, De Jong spent the years of World War II in Zürich, while her Dutch father went into hiding in the Netherlands. In 1947, the family reunited and went back to living in Hengelo, where Jacqueline’s father owned a lace and stocking company. Despite the rather provincial setting of Hengelo, De Jong came into contact with avant-garde art early on: her parents were active and engaged art collectors, acquiring works by artists like Karel Appel, Jean Dubuffet, Roberto Matta and Wilfredo Lam. Before finishing high school, De Jong went to Paris and London to pursue an acting career, but this came to an abrupt end when she failed the admission exam for the acting school in Arnhem. She then started to work for the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, assisting the director Willem Sandberg with various tasks. Through her parents and her work at the Stedelijk she met Asger Jorn, with whom she started a relationship, and the German group SPUR, whose members she befriended. In 1960, she became a member of the Situationist International at its fourth congress in London. In 1961, she decided to move to Paris to devote herself exclusively to an artistic career.
The 60s in Paris saw the waning of Art Informel, Abstraction lyrique and the vitalism that had informed painting up until that moment. New movements were on the rise, such as Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, and new figuration. Jacqueline de Jong tapped into the moment: she was fascinated by the new medium of television, and popular media like science fiction and pornography provided important impulses for her work. Her work, which had been abstract until this point, became more and more figurative; she started to develop her own distinctive artistic perspective and also started to work in series. De Jong’s artistic output in the 60s is also defined by her work on The Situationist Times (her own situationist magazine, which she ran between 1962 and 1967, after being kicked out by the situationists proper in 1962) and the political posters that she made for the protests of 1968.
In 1971, De Jong moved back to Amsterdam. She had run into money problems with her last issue of the The Situationist Times, broken up with Asger Jorn, and lost her studio. In Amsterdam, she found a squat where she would live together with her new partner, Hans Brinkman. Brinkman later had a gallery in Amsterdam that Jaqueline de Jong helped to run. Continuing to work in series, here she first made the Diptychs (Chronique D’Amsterdam) and Diary Drawing, combining text and images, as a way of showing her peers in Paris what life was for her in Amsterdam.
The next major series of works were marked by a more realistic painterly style. In her Billiards series, De Jong paints sleek, Pop-inspired scenes of pool games, and in Série Noire (1980–82), the series that followed, she draws inspiration from the detective novels put out by Marcel Duhamel’s postwar publishing imprint of the same name.
From the early 1990s, De Jong’s work repeatedly focused on war and images thereof, as can be seen in her 1991 series Megaliths (1991–93), which deals with the collective mass-media experience of the First Gulf War; her series War 1914-1918 (2013–24), where she draws a line from World War I to Syria; Border-Line (2020–23), on the refugee crisis in Greece; and Disaster (2022–24) on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Next to these politically charged works, the surroundings of her house in the Bourbonnais, in France, became a source of artistic inspiration. Growing potatoes and letting them sprout, she drew them in oil stick, resulting in her Potato Blues (2017) collages, as well as her Pommes de Jong series of sculptures and jewelry. Next to these series with defined points of departures, the Loose works show a commitment to an expressive and imaginative form of painting that persisted throughout her career in various forms, one in which monsters, animals, and humans meet in contorted ways, somewhere between violence and eroticism.
Recent solo exhibitions include Vicious Circles at NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale; Narrative / Non-Narrative at Ortuzar Projects, New York (2024); Frontspace: Border…and other Lines at Dürst Britt & Mayhew, The Hague, Netherlands (2023); The Ultimate Kiss at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, Mostyn in Llandudno, Wales, and Kunstmuseum Ravensburg (2021, 2022); Border-Line at Ortuzar Projects, New York (2021); Catastrophes at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2020); Pinball Wizard at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2019); Retrospective at Musée Les Abattoirs, Toulouse (2018); Jacqueline de Jong & The Situationist Times at Malmö Konsthall (2018); and Undercover in de kunst at Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen (2003). Her work has been featured in surveys including Strategic Vandalism: The Legacy of Asger Jorn’s Modification Paintings, Petzel, New York (2019); Asger Jorn & Jacqueline de Jong: Case of the Ascetic Satyr, Galerie Clemens Thimme, Karlsruhe (2016); and The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up: Cobra and Its Legacy, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2015).
