Screening & Meet the Artists: André de Jong & Beppie Gielkens

Screening & Artist Talk: With artists André de Jong en Beppie Gielkens. Opening weekend of the new exhibition of The Merchant House (TMH).

With “André de Jong and His Theater,” TMH is pleased to present new works by the distinguished Dutch artist André de Jong (b. 1947). His fifth major exhibition at TMH, it reflects one of the most prolific periods of his career—which has encompassed drawing as well as photography, sculpture, and land art—and poses the question: What is it about drawing, above all, that has continued to fascinate André de Jong for over five decades?

“André de Jong and His Theater” presents several of de Jong’s new open-ended drawing series, together with photography, sketchbooks, selected objects, and a commissioned video work. In the gallery-wide installation, de Jong’s epic forms in black on white (in ink, pencil, graphite, and charcoal on an array of his favorite papers) unfold in sequences that do not seem to have a particular end and confirm that the very practice of their making constitutes its own theory. He finds the forms that perform.

Every exhibition of de Jong is an occasion to discover what his long days of inquiry and his unrehearsed studio “performances” might yield. This time, there is also a dedication: to painting, with works of Beppie Gielkens, de Jong’s partner and also artist of TMH. The inclusion of paintings of Gielkens in the exhibition is an acknowledgement of the role played by painting in their shared artistic life—and of the place that painting occupies for him. But what we see in the works of de Jong, with Gielkens’s lush color surfaces in counterpoint, is the line itself, front and center.