The new exhibition Jacqueline de Jong – Olivia van Kuiken,Works on Paper at PS projectspace (13 April – 2 May, 2024) includes works by our artist Jacqueline de Jong.
Olivia van Kuiken, Chicago 1997, graduated from Cooper Union in 2019 and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. It is the first time that her work will be seen in the Netherlands. Jacqueline de Jong, Hengelo 1939, lives and works alternately in Amsterdam and Bourbonnais, France. Young and established, both equally urgent.
Jacqueline de Jong was born in Hengelo in 1939. Before she was 20, she moved to Paris and London, where she studied. Since 1960, De Jong has been building an impressive oeuvre as an experimental visual artist. She belongs to the avant-garde that set the tone of the art scene for the second half of the 20th century. Strongly committed and involved in social debate, in the 1960s she was part of the International Situationists, an artistic-political group that wanted to disrupt the established order with happenings, and had a major influence on the later punk movement. Her work - whether as a painter, sculptor or graphic artist - attracted interest from the start, both in Europe and in the United States. In the Netherlands she was asked, among other things, for the murals in the Stopera and an installation for the Nederlandsche Bank. In 2019, De Jong received the French Aware Prize for her exceptional career and oeuvre. The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, with which it has had a good relationship since 1958, organized the overview exhibition Pinball Wizard. De Jong lives and works alternately in Amsterdam and Bourbonnais, France.
Olivia van Kuiken, merges abstract and representational subjects to upend traditional notions of legibility. She considers the meaning of accuracy as it pertains to visual representation: what is needed to create an identifiable image and what are its associations? She avoids narrative conventions and instead, begins each piece with a formally derived structure or logic guided by a preexisting work. The artist creates a series of sketches, engaging an intuitive and frenetic drawing practice that informs her paintings on canvas. Enlarging small scribbling forms into sinuous, stretching shapes, she parodies the gesture itself and questions mythic status of the artist’s hand. (From press release, ‘Make me Mulch!’, Chapter NY).
Olivia van Kuiken's paintings are concerned with alienation. Forms, shapes and text are pushed to the edge of legibility through a shift in context. Gestural marks and pools of colour are often overlaid with figurative and digital motifs. The resulting fragmented compositions echo the complexity of language as a means of communication both linguistically and visually.(From ‘Olivia van Kuiken’s Linguistic Painting’, Rory Mitchell, Ocula).
