Jacqueline de Jong (1939–2024) was a Dutch visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice spanned painting, sculpture, printmaking, publishing, and, in the later decades of her career, artist jewellery and wearable art. While she first gained recognition for her fiercely expressive figurative paintings and her role in the European avant-garde of the 1960s, her sculptural jewellery forms became an important extension of her visual language — translating her bold, surreal imagery into intimate, body-related works of art.
Born in Enschede and raised in Hengelo in the Netherlands, De Jong’s early life was shaped by wartime displacement before she returned home and eventually moved to London in the late 1950s to study acting. She soon shifted toward the visual arts, working at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and studying printmaking at Atelier 17 in Paris, where she developed the experimental approach that would define her career. In the early 1960s she was associated with the Situationist International, and soon after founded and edited The Situationist Times, an influential artist-run journal that merged political thought with radical visual culture.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, De Jong became known for emotionally charged painting series such as Accidental Paintings, Suicidal Paintings, and Private Lives of Cosmonauts, in which distorted figures, erotic symbolism, and references to contemporary conflict reflected the anxieties of the Cold War era. This longstanding fascination with the human body — as a site of desire, violence, vulnerability, and transformation — later found a new outlet in her jewellery and wearable art.
From the 2000s onward, De Jong increasingly explored sculptural objects designed to be worn on the body. Rather than approaching jewellery as decoration, she treated it as a continuation of her fine art practice. Her artist jewellery often emerged from unexpected materials and organic references, most notably in works inspired by sprouting potatoes. She transformed these everyday forms into surreal, tactile sculptures that could function as brooches, pendants, or small wearable objects. These pieces retained the expressive tension of her paintings while introducing scale, touch, and bodily proximity. In doing so, she blurred boundaries between sculpture, adornment, and conceptual art, positioning her within the field of contemporary art jewellery and experimental wearable art.
Her jewellery works echo the same themes present in her paintings: metamorphosis, fragility, humor, and the uneasy relationship between beauty and decay. By placing these sculptural forms on the body, De Jong intensified their psychological charge, turning wearable art into a direct encounter between artwork and wearer. This late body of work expanded her audience and connected her practice to dialogues in artist-made jewellery, sculptural adornment, and cross-disciplinary visual art.
De Jong exhibited widely across Europe and the United States, with her work held in major public and private collections. In 2012, her Situationist archive was acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, contributing to renewed international scholarship on her practice. That same year she had a major solo exhibition at Moderna Museet. In 2019 she received the Outstanding Merit Prize from AWARE, and in 2023 she was appointed Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
Living and working between Amsterdam and Buxières-les-Mines, France, Jacqueline de Jong remained artistically active until her death in 2024. Her legacy bridges painting, political avant-garde publishing, sculpture, and artist jewellery, leaving behind a body of work in which wearable art becomes a powerful extension of figurative expression and a radical rethinking of what jewellery can be.
