La petite mort

De Jong began her career in Paris in 1961, where in the early part of the decade she was part of Situationist International, with whom she was active from 1960 to 1962, and befriended artists from Gruppe SPUR. Inspired by her avant-garde associations, de Jong was emboldened to disregard the prevalent post-war European artistic tradition in favour of a distinct and idiosyncratic style that encapsulated her revolutionary attitude to composition and characterisation. Examples from de Jong’s AccidentalandSuicidal Paintings, both series begun in 1964, capture her dynamic and corporeal approach to both the personal and political. In Autostop Suicide (1965), a raucous expression of the sexual revolution that was taking over 1960s Paris, a humanoid figure dances into traffic, spatters of paint provoking a visceral reaction in the viewer. Such moribund imagery is typical of de Jong’s work from this period, in which skeletal figures cavort ecstatically with one another. Skeletons also appear with frequency in her work of the 2020s, including in In the Streets of L. (2022) where de Jong depicts one such figure sucking souls from a teeming pool that calls to mind the River Styx of Greek mythology.

De Jong has unfailingly interrogated human brutality in her work. She is critically aware of the cruelty of our day to day lives, in which the news cycle plays on a constant loop. While the works of the 1960s were concerned with the savagery of the everyday, since the 1980s de Jong has looked closely at war. In her new paintings she explores

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the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, paying close attention to the refugee emergency that both crises have engendered. In Bucha, Ukraine II (2022) a mass of entangled figures huddle within the canvas, escaping the flames that lick its upper edge. An image of a lone wheel harks back to de Jong’s Accidental Paintings of the mid-1960s, which featured bouncing automobile parts in a nod to a road accident witnessed by the artist. The cadaverous inhabitants in de Jong’s historic paintings are a reminder of the ghosts of Europe’s war-stricken past, and it is versions of these enigmatic characters that she uses to address the war-torn subjects of her paintings today, inciting the viewer to reckon with their own humanity as they process world events. By recycling the visual language that was so striking at the start of her career, de Jong intimates that unless we can learn from past experience, we risk history repeating itself.