FOLKERT DE JONG

Born 1972 in Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Folkert de Jong, The Balance, 2010, styrofoam and pigmented polyurethane foam, dimensions variable. Copyright © 2010 OFFICE For Contemporary Art, Amsterdam Photograph: Aatjan Renders. This work was made possible with the support of the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, Amsterdam

Folkert de Jong is a sculptor and installation artist. Since completing his studies at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam in 2000, de Jong has become known for his adept use of unconventional art materials – Styrofoam, polyurethane foam and polystyrene, originally used in building construction and the film industry. From these he creates evocative, figurative tableaux that draw from such sources as art history, horror films, the First and Second World Wars, contemporary politics, oil-based economies and chemical manufacturing industries. In life-sized sculptural groupings of sometimes grotesque appearance, the artist portrays the darker aspects of life.

De Jong’s human, and sometimes simian, subjects populate large-scale installations that recall civic sculpture and monuments and thereby comment on the physical manifestation of power. His contrasting use of lightweight foam – a material devoid of association with art – conceptually links the sculptures with the history of a construction material that signifies both comfort (insulation) and industrial advancement (the encapsulation of an idea of progress in which a mass can be economically produced from a small amount). Used significantly for life rafts in the First World War, and once produced by factories responsible for other wartime-associated materials such as Napalm, Agent Orange and DDT, de Jong’s material of choice is consciously politically incorrect, used to darkly preface his works with connotations of scientific abuse and environmental despoliation. This ‘immoral’ material is left in its natural, manufacturer-trademarked colours of blue, green and pink, with paint applied luridly and voluptuously in slapdash smears and oozes. De Jong’s creations run the gamut of sculptural techniques, and he expertly models, moulds, cuts, pours and assembles the visceral substances. The distinct textures and oozing aesthetic of the foam create mixed impressions of tactility and repulsion, added to which grotesque elements and humour act to both anaesthetise taboo subjects and create an analytical distance from the menace of his dark themes.

In early works, symbols such as human skeletons and firearms were commonly used to evoke war atrocities and human vulnerability, subjects inspired by such artists as the German expressionist Otto Dix. In the installation Les Saltimbanques (2007), de Jong references Picasso’s paintings of the migrant communities of acrobats, musicians and clowns. In this contemporary version, the gloomy-faced performers enact a human pyramid while balancing on oil barrels, or gather in a parody of community togetherness, expressing for de Jong a moment of spiritual contemplation, a study of alienation and precariousness, and a meditation on the artist’s position in history and society. De Jong’s universalising strategy of using figures and objects in different historical times allows the artist to conjure a condition specific to our contemporary time, and his riveting, staged scenes are created with the emotive intelligence of a movie director – testament to such influences as Fritz Lang and Ingmar Bergman.

De Jong’s new work for the Biennale will be an exercise in barbarity examining the cruelty and rapaciousness of materialism and capitalism – old and new. In a monumental, figurative sculptural installation, the artist draws from three different existing historical artworks: a seventeenth-century oil painting in Amsterdam, a twentieth-century city monument in New York and a nineteenth-century totem pole in Alaska; artworks which are themselves based on important historical events. Subjects of cultural exchange, political and economical power, slave trading, colonisation, political murder and intrigue are examined.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2010 ‘Circle of Trust’, Groninger Museum, Groningen, The Netherlands
2009 ‘Mirror and the Cross’, Luis Adelantado Gallery, Valencia, Spain
2008 ‘1000 Years Business as Usual’, James Cohan Gallery, Shanghai, China
2007 ‘Les Saltimbanques’, James Cohan Gallery, New York, USA
2006 ‘Gott Mit Uns’, Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland
2009 ‘Shape of Things to Come’, Saatchi Gallery London, London, UK

Selected Group Exhibitions

2009 ‘The Rhetoric of Doubt’, Andre Simoens Gallery, Knokke, Belgium
2009 ‘Sculpture of Our Time’, Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut, USA
2008 ‘Double Diplomacy’, Neon Parc Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
2008 ‘All for Art’, Musée des Beaux-art de Montréal, Montreal, Canada

Selected Bibliography

Michael Amy, ‘Folkert de Jong: Confronting the Grotesque’, Sculpture, vol. 27, 5 June 2008, pp. 24–33
Jean-Jacques Breton and Annabelle Ténèze, Picasso: Ses maîtres et ses héritiers, Beaux-art de Paris, Paris, 2008, pp. 151–73
Meghan Dailey, The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture, Saatchi Gallery & Jonathan Cape, London, pp. 12, 152–77
Tanguy Eeckhout and T. Koenig, ‘Double Diplomacy: A dialogue with perspective’, Folkert de Jong + Fendry Ekel: Double Diplomacy, exhibition catalogue, Black Cat Publishing, Amsterdam, 2008, p. 80
S. van der Zijpp, Y. Tsitsovits and J. Declercq A.O., Circle Of Trust: Folkert de Jong – Selected Works 2001–2009, exhibition catalogue, Groninger Museum, Black Cat Publishing, The Netherlands, 2009, p. 144