This may be a little out of our region, but occasionally an event comes along which merits a mention, and for art lovers everywhere, this is most certainly one of them.
The work of celebrated painter and avant-garde artist Jaqueline de Jong will get its first institutional exhibition at MOSTYN gallery in Llandudno. THE ULTIMATE KISS runs through to February next year.
The Dutch artist is a crucial figure in the post-war years of protest and revolt and celebrated painter
Born in the Netherlands in 1939, Jacqueline has enjoyed a career spanning half a century. Her role in the Situationist International marked her early years in Paris in the 1960s, where she was actively involved in the student protests of May 1968.
In parallel to her work as an editor and designer – most notably for The Situationist Times, which she founded and published from 1962 until 1967 – Jacqueline has developed a unique painterly practice. In its spontaneity, her expressive, often grotesque and excessive style follows the anti-academic and non- conformist aesthetic of the avant-garde.
The phrase itself sums up Jacqueline’s passion. Avant-garde is originally a French term, meaning in English vanguard or advance guard (the part of an army that goes forward ahead of the rest). It first appeared with reference to art in France in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is usually credited to the influential thinker Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the forerunners of socialism.
He believed in the social power of the arts and saw artists, alongside scientists and industrialists, as the leaders of a new society.
Playfully moving between styles and painterly idioms throughout her career, she displays a voracious interest in the painted image as a site for confusion and subversion. She belongs to a group of artists who reintroduced narration by borrowing elements from popular culture, cinema, and illustration, all the while mixing the absurd with the mysterious.
To take a look into the mind of Jacqueline, here’s the trailer for The Art Rebel, a movie about her life and work by French filmmaker François Lévy-Kuentz.
With a penchant for experimentation, Jacqueline plays with shape, style, and pictorial idioms in order to unfold an idiosyncratic and subversive body of work. Expressive yet realistic, her work exhibits uninhibited eroticism and sexual liberation.
The exhibition at MOSTYN is the first public presentation of Jacqueline’s prolific and provocative oeuvre in the UK.
The exhibition has been curated by Juliette Desorgues (Curator of Visual Arts, MOSTYN) in collaboration with Devrim Bayar (Curator, WIELS) and Xander Karskens (Director, DeAteliers). From Llandudno, the exhibition will travel to Kunstmuseum Ravensburg next year.
Situated in the coastal town of Llandudno, MOSTYN is Wales’ foremost visual arts centre, serving as a platform for contemporary artistic practice and audience engagement. MOSTYN presents outstanding and critically engaged international contemporary art that engages, inspires and encourages people to form and share new perspectives on the world through its programmes. It’s part of the Plus TATE, the UK-wide contemporary visual art network.
THE ULTIMATE KISS is on right now and runs through to 6th February 2022.
MOSTYN is on Vaughan Street in Llandudno, if you are going to make the trip, the postcode is LL30 1AB. The gallery is open Tuesday – Sunday 10.30am – 4.00pm ADMISSION FREE.
As you can see, the gallery is behind a traditional Edwardian façade, in the beautiful seaside town of Llandudno, the place and the gallery is well worth a visit.