The 2022 monograph about ANDRÉ DE JONG (1945, NL) includes a text by essayist Jan Postma entitled to “To See Seeing.” The title captures the extraordinary nature of De Jong’s photographic archive—so large that it would be impossible to exhibit. The current show includes a printed selection from De Jong’s New York (2005) and nature diaries (continuous). These diaries have historically complemented De Jong’s performative photography in the studio, with some images created as standalone artworks and others as photographic “sketches” for drawings and other works.
In describing De Jong’s series, Postma writes: “I can say that a section of a fire escape can be seen on one of the photographs of New York, but that is not what really matters. What is captured is the jet-black metal, casting shadows, and the ephemeral nothingness behind it… I can say that another photograph shows a piece of wood, a part of a tree trunk. But it [the image] is more about how you realize that life once hid itself inside the trunk.” De Jong is an exceptional draftsman, but also a prolific photographer, a performance artist, a practitioner of land art, and a master of sculptural form. De Jong lives and works in Friesland, NL.
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, his work has met with critical and public acclaim when exhibited by TMH in Amsterdam and New York. In 2021, the monograph André de Jong: Acts of Drawingwas published by TMH with the support of the Mondrian Fund. The monograph is a “book about” and a haptic art object, arranged into thematic chapters that bear the titles of his series, and provides a unique introduction to his vast photographic output.