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Jacqueline de Jong: Disobedience
Edited by Melanie Bühler

Published by JRP|Editions, Geneva, and Kunstmuseum St.Gallen, 2025

Published to accompany the artist’s retrospective at the Kunstmuseum St.Gallen (September 2025–March 2026), this comprehensive monograph offers a detailed overview of the work of Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong (Hengelo, Netherlands, 1939–Amsterdam, 2024). Her idiosyncratic oeuvre of painting, sculpture, and graphic art has been produced in dialogue with some of the most important postwar artistic movements in Europe—including art brut, Pop art, New Figuration, and Postmodernism—over a period of more than six decades. According to Melanie Bühler, curator of the exhibition: “De Jong was a singular artist: a pioneer who confronted the male-dominated art world with wit, charm, intelligence, tenacity, and self-reliance. Her work, created between the early 1960s and 2024, was fearlessly oriented toward the world. It reflects an open, engaged mind, with De Jong’s attention repeatedly turning to the hidden, rebellious, dark, and sensual aspects of human existence.”

De Jong became involved in the Situationist International, a radical avant-garde movement whose members aimed to break free from the spectacle of capitalism and create adventurous, self-directed encounters with the world when she was 21. Throughout her career, she stayed true to this spirit. Her shapeshifting and often politically engaged work was playful, erotic, funny, dark, and always radically contemporary. Unafraid and open, she sought to uncover what was concealed below the surfaces of the images that came at her in ever-increasing numbers and at an ever-increasing speed with the rise of TV, the internet, and social media. 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 and more honest version of humanity might emerge.

Designed by Sabo Day and edited by Melanie Bülher, this publication spans De Jong’s entire artistic journey of from her editorial activities and bold figurative paintings of the 1960s to her “Billiards” series in the 1970s, and her latest series of the 2020s that reflect the current state of the world. It features new essays by Karen Kurczynski (Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst), Emily LaBarge (writer and critic), Tiana Reid (Assistant Professor of English at York University), Paul Bernard (Director of Kunsthaus Biel), as well as an as-yet-unpublished conversation with the artist and McKenzie Wark (writer and theoretician). Organized through six sections entitled “Disobedience,” “Publishing,” “Chaos,” “Pop,” “Play,” and “Politics,” all lavishly illustrated, it underlines the challenging approach to art and life developed by De Jong formally, visually, and conceptually from the early 1960s until 2024.

CLIENT

Kunstmuseum St.Gallen

LINK

https://jrp-editions.com/art/books/monographs-artists-books/jacqueline-de-jong-disobedience/

CREDITS

Editorial Assistance: Henna Keski-Mäenpää
Editorial Coordination (JRP|Editions): Clément Dirié
Design: Sabo Day (assisted by Augustinas Milkus)
German Copyediting and Proofreading: Ilka Backmeister-Collacott
English Proofreading: Danielle N. Carter

Photos: JRP|Editions / Kunstmuseum St.Gallen

Anita Iannacchione