ANDRÉ DE JONG

Folds and Drawings

17 Oct – 21 Dec 2014

On 17 October 2014, TMH opens its new season with a large-scale exhibition of the visionary Dutch artist ANDRÉ DE JONG, whose prolific career spans over four decades.

Whether plunging into the “ultimate” formal depths postulated by Ad Reinhardt or Eva Hesse-like plays of artifact, the art of André de Jong defies categorization. Recognizing the importance of de Jong’s query of man and nature, Han Steenbruggen, Director of the Museum Belvédère in Heerenveen, NL, dedicated the museum’s central space to his solo show in 2010. From the first drawings and photographs in the exhibition catalogue, de Jong’s oeuvre unfolds with uncanny beauty and masterful draftsmanship, which leave little doubt of this modest man’s place in the top echelons of contemporary art, next to Pierre Soulages, Annette Messager, Giuseppe Penone, and Georg Baselitz, to name but a few.

The focus of the exhibition is on the new mixed-media reliefs Folds and a related series of works from de Jong’s vast oeuvre. Strikingly, his mostly black-and-white “drawn images”—he uses pencil, charcoal, ink, Siberian chalk, and oil stick or pigment on regular and heavily worked paper—capture the illuminated color fields and vital forms of nature chanced upon or staged by the artist.

PUBLICATION
TMH Catalogue 2.1, 2014

SCREENING
André de Jong’s New York, 18 Sep 2015

Download Press Release

BIOGRAPHY

André de Jong (1945, NL) has been pushing the limits of drawing in his magisterial oeuvre for over five decades. And he is also a performance artist, a photographer, and a master of sculptural form and transient land art. Rooted in poetically captured trajectories of the body, of our ambivalent, gender-stretching sense of self, de Jong’s art is uniquely intersubjective and socially formative. De Jong’s 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 a retrospective in 2010. Since then de Jong’s work has met with critical and public acclaim when exhibited by TMH in Amsterdam and New York.

FOLDS

DRAWINGS

WATERFALL

Waterval | Waterfall, 2013
Charcoal and Siberian chalk on Rives paper (300 g)
122 x 80 cm / 112 x 76 cm, each

PORTRAIT / SELF-PORTRAIT

Portret/Zelfportret | Portrait/Self-Portrait, 2008
Charcoal, Siberian chalk, graphite,
and ink on Simili Japon paper (225 g)
32 x 24 cm, each