Z4- Dürst Britt & Mayhew

The exhibition focuses on works from the 1990s and specifically on works made on sailcloth and panel. Working on sailcloth started with a commission for a branch of the Nederlandse Bank in Drachten in Friesland in 1992. De Jong was fascinated by the many shipyards in the area, where skûtsjes were built and thus she came across various discarded pieces of sailcloth. For the bank she made a partition in the middle of the office between the cashiers and the main lobby in the form of a sailcloth painted on both sides. This work ‘The Backside of Existence’ will be on view in De Jong’s upcoming retrospective at WIELS in Brussels, opening on the 1st of May.

The commission started a further series of works on sailcloth. The monumental installation ‘Hanging Women’ is included in the exhibition at Dürst Britt & Mayhew. This piece of painted unstretched cloth serves as a theatrical staging for a series of other paintings on sailcloth and board, depicting various road accidents. Both the work ‘Hanging Women’ and the car crash paintings are reminiscent of de Jong’s ‘Accidental’ and ‘Suicidal’ paintings from the 1960s. Despair and chaos are never far away and the works are a stark reminder of our current feverish times, in which we have to fight our monsters and try to find our feet again.

A series of small Indian ink drawings mounted on panel from 1973 and two large drawings from 1996 complete the exhibition, with their restless and hallucinatory imagery. They show De Jong’s continuous agility to stage her haunting protagonists, be they humans or monsters, in diverse formats and materials.