Jacqueline de Jong: Disobedience - by Melanie Bühler (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Playful, erotic, dark and radically contemporary, de Jong's idiosyncratic oeuvre exposed society's dark undercurrents in the hope of a more humane world

Published with Kunstmuseum St. Gallen.

Published to accompany the artist's retrospective at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Disobedience encapsulates the oeuvre of Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong (1939-2024), a member of the Situationist International who experimented with art brut, Pop art, New Figuration, postmodernism and countless other movements over her 60-year career. Her art was dedicated to revealing the hidden undercurrents--eroticism, violence, fear, agony and lust--and, with a sense of play and pleasure, reinterpreting them so that a radical, more honest version of humanity might emerge. This publication spans de Jong's entire artistic journey, from her editorial activities of the 1960s to her Billiards series in the 1970s, and her final works in the early 2020s. Organized through six sections entitled "Disobedience," "Publishing," "Chaos," "Pop," "Play" and "Politics," it underlines the challenging approach to art and life developed by de Jong formally, visually and conceptually from the early 1960s until 2024.