AMSTERDAM.- With André de Jong and His Theater, The Merchant House presents 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?

We see unquestionable value in de Jong’s works, which seem to defy the limits of the line’s graphic force. For de Jong, the value is in his method: “I enact a performance, grab a sketchbook…” Taking the theatrical to heart, the installation for André de Jong and His Theater fills the walls of the gallery with unframed, overflowing paper panels from his new body-landscape series and other drawings. The effect is double, as always with de Jong: the drawings belong together, and each nevertheless comes across as an event in de Jong’s universe.


TMH installation view, featuring works of André de Jong. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij.

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 (1942, NL), 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.


TMH installation view, featuring works of Beppie Gielkens. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij.

Working with de Jong on the monograph André de Jong: Acts of Drawing (published by TMH, 2021, sponsored by the Mondrian Fund) brought to light that, for him, drawing cannot be merely about representation. Judging from what he reveals in some of his photographs (a critical part of his method), we are led to believe that, as familiar objects shift realms in his studio to become props—arrows, lace, string, flowers—an essential transformation of both the identity of the object and the artist’s body takes place. “Drawing is a kind of breaking out [of the body].” André de Jong and His Theater aims to bring this transformation into view: from his studio performances and inspections in their actuality, through to his sketchbooks’ theater of memory—captured in initial lines—and finally to the drawings themselves, which speak to us as an ensemble of physical acts.

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. We cannot help but marvel at the imagination behind these works and the desire to register one’s life in drawing—the very qualities that continue to fascinate us in art.


Limited edition of TMH monograph, André de Jong; Acts of Drawing (2021). Published by TMH, sponsored by the Mondrian Fund, printed by Cultura. Limited edition of 21 includes Enigma artwork.

The Artists

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, de Jong’s 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 Drawing was 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.

TMH Projects: To See Seeing (solo), 2024 / TMH’s 10th Anniversary Presentation at PAN Amsterdam, 2023 / New Photography & the Ephemeral (group show), 2022 / TMH Publishing: Art Practice (group show), 2022 / Clear Water (group show), 2020 / Reflections on Abstraction at Art Rotterdam (with André Stempfel), 2021 / The Indispensable Experience of Art (group show), 2021 / Revelations, Parts I & II (solo), 2019 / Super Drawings at Art Rotterdam (with Hilarius Hofstede), 2018 / Post-Minimalism (group show), 2016 / New York Diary (solo presentation) at Salon Zürcher, New York, 2015 / Folds and Drawings (solo), 2014. Publications & Editions: Enigma, 2021 / Acts of Drawing, 2021 / TMH Catalogue 2.1, 2014.

Beppie Gielkens (1942, NL) uses color and line to conjure up a powerful narrative structure that continuously invites new readings. Gielkens had the first solo show of her paintings in Maastricht in 1971 soon after graduating from the Jan van Eyck Academie. Unprecedented for a young Western woman in the 1980s, she received artistic acclaim in Egypt, with solo shows at the Fine Arts Gallery / Cairo Opera House in 1989 and the Mashrabia Gallery in 1994. She continued to have regular solo exhibitions with Dutch galleries and be included in museum shows with the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, and Museum Belvédère, Heerenveen. Already in the late 1980s, art writer Huub Mous defined her work as an “intuitive urge to rearrange and order, in a new connection.”

TMH Projects: Light in Its Own Language (with Amanda Means), 2024 / TMH’s 10th Anniversary Presentation at PAN Amsterdam, 2023 / Painting Otherwise (solo), 2022. Publications: Consequences IV, 2026.



The Merchant House

The Merchant House (TMH) presents contemporary art to discover, immerse oneself in, and collect. As an art platform in Amsterdam, we focus on research-based projects developed in collaboration with artists. Each project, curated by TMH’s Founding Artistic Director Marsha Plotnitsky, brings together an extended exhibition, public programs and research events, and a dedicated catalogue or artist’s book.

TMH has showcased international and Dutch artists, including Sylvie Bonnot, Boris Chouvellon, Chuck Close, John Coplans, André de Jong, Jan Frank, Beppie Gielkens, Rini Hurkmans, Hilarius Hofstede, Craigie Horsfield, Kokou Ferdinand Makouvia, Mary Sue, Amanda Means, Ruth Meijer, Dennis Oppenheim, Henk Peeters, Pino Pinelli, Judit Reigl, Carolee Schneemann, Jan Schoonhoven, André Stempfel, Elsa Tomkowiak, JCJ Vanderheyden, Kees Visser, Leo Vroegindeweij, Margret Wibmer, Mengzhi Zheng, and Zhu Hong. Since TMH first opened its doors in a historic Amsterdam canal house in 2013, it has come to be known as a contemporary interpretation of the Dutch merchant tradition: a vibrant art space open to the public.

Browse through the gallery’s program online here: www.merchanthouse.nl