ANDRÉ DE JONG
Acts of Drawing
Book launch & new nature photography
16 Sep – 10 Dec 2021
ANDRÉ DE JONG has been pushing the limits of drawing for over five decades. Now, his work is being examined in the new monograph Acts of Drawing, arranged into thematic chapters that bear the titles of his series, such as “Body-Landscape” and “Folds.” The added references to times of day invite viewers to respond to de Jong’s ways of working, grounded in daily actions. Highlights from these series that have been critically acclaimed in his recent shows in Amsterdam and New York will feature at TMH.
The book also provides an introduction to the artist’s vast photographic output. During the lockdowns, de Jong, who is at the height of his game, has returned to making photographic observations around his studio. De Jong’s photographs, as Jan Postma observes in the book, are “images that seem to identify the moment when reality becomes unrecognizable.”
EVENTS
Open weekend, 26-28 Nov 2021 / Curator tour with Marsha Plotnitsky, 9 Oct 2021 / Book signing with the artist, 18 Sep 2021
ABOUT THE BOOK
André de Jong: Acts of Drawing is a “book about” and a haptic art object. For the first time, it will bring to light de Jong’s singular drawing series and work process. It is a rare case nowadays, but his prescient oeuvre remained virtually unseen for four decades—he has been living and working away from art centers in the countryside of Friesland—until Museum Belvédère, NL, mounted his retrospective in 2010. Since then his work has met with critical and public acclaim when exhibited by The Merchant House in Amsterdam and New York.
For the first time, this book brings together de Jong’s landmark drawing series: Body-Landscape, Hands, Heads and Portraits, Photographic Acts, Revelations, Folds, and Body/Body Parts. It also features a previously unseen selection of raw tree images from his vast photography archive.
BIOGRAPHY
André de Jong (1945, NL) is an exceptional draftsman, but also a prolific photographer, a performance artist, a practitioner of land art, and a master of sculptural form. In 1979, de Jong set up his studio in Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands. His long periods of working in relative isolation have been punctuated by exploratory trips to Iceland and Norway, reflecting his early artistic choice—more visionary today than ever—to confront our uneasy presence in nature. Rooted in poetically captured trajectories of the body, of our ambivalent, gender-stretching sense of self, André de Jong’s art is uniquely intersubjective and socially formative. His vision has the power to move and transform us.
