Jacqueline de Jong’s potatoes (a tuberous reverie)
Jacqueline de Jong defied easy categorization. Painter, sculptor, editor, and one-time member of the Situationist International, she was an uncompromising force.
We first met in 2017 in The Hague. At the time, I was living in London and working as Associate Curator at the ICA, an institution Jacqueline knew well, having participated in the Situationist International conference held there in 1960. In the years that followed, our paths would cross often and a friendship gradually grew despite our 46-year age gap. What began as a chance encounter developed into a meaningful connection, which was marked by several collaborations, including an exhibition dedicated to her work which I curated at MOSTYN in Wales in 2022. The exhibition was titled The Ultimate Kiss, a name borrowed from one of her 2012 paintings and chosen by Jacqueline herself. A final curtain call, her last farewell.
Jacqueline passed away in June 2024. Her funeral was held in Amsterdam, the city she had called home since the 1970s following her riotous Parisian years in the 1960s. At the ceremony, mourners were handed potatoes, an offering at once darkly humorous and deeply moving—much like Jacqueline herself.
It felt strangely fitting that she would return to the earth in the season when potatoes are typically pulled from the soil. She relished contradiction. Staidness and levity were never far apart.
She had always loved potatoes. At Bouan, the farmhouse in the French countryside she acquired in the 1990s, she cultivated them in abundance, growing different varieties, cooking with them, and storing them in the house’s damp cellar where they slowly sprouted into unearthly forms.
In her later career, Jacqueline would go on to dedicate entire bodies of work to the humble tuber. In 2006, she created Baked Potato, an outdoor installation of ceramic potato–like sculptures installed at Asger Jorn’s estate in Albissola Marina. From 2016 to 2018, she produced a series of jewellery pieces titled Pommes de Jong made of shrunken potato sprouts cast in gold and platinum, which she often gifted to friends and collaborators. Her Potato Blues print series, produced in 2017, became an artist’s publication with the added subtitle La Psychogéographie des pommes de terre (Paris: Onestar press), a sly nod to the Situationist International’s legacy.
Jacqueline de Jong artist publication, La Psychogéographie des pommes de terre, Onestar press (Paris), 2017
Digital print, oil stick
and nepheline gel on canvas (91 × 61cm)
Courtesy the Jacqueline de Jong Foundation and Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse
Pommes de Jong, 2016–20
18-carat yellow gold plated shrunken potato sprouts (variable dimensions)
Courtesy the Jacqueline de Jong Foundation, Galerie MiniMasterpiece, Paris and Elisabetta Cipriani Gallery, London
With each of these works, the potato is transformed, rendered anthropomorphic, almost cartoonish, caught in the throes of pain or erotic entanglement. The modest vegetable became an expressive protagonist in her beautifully strange and subversive world—playful yet incisive, absurd yet purposeful. In Jacqueline’s hands, the ordinary slipped its bounds, becoming unruly, vital and defiantly alive.
When I returned to Paris after the funeral, I placed the two potatoes I’d been given in a cupboard. Weeks later, I opened the door to find them transformed. Long, pale roots had emerged, reaching outward, grasping at the air. It felt like a quiet, perfect tribute.
These sprouting potatoes in a darkened cupboard became a metaphor for her life and work. A gesture of rebellion and an insistence on humour. A refusal to be stilled, even in death.
They serve as a quiet reminder that even in absence, something endures—a silent unfolding where the absurdity of existence and the poetics of loss intertwine.
Header image: Exhibition poster for Galerie J. Walter Thompson in Amsterdam, 1970, courtesy the Jacqueline de Jong Foundation. Final image: Sprouting potatoes, 2025, from the author’s personal archive.
Juliette Desorgues is a curator and writer based in Paris. With a background in art history and theory from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Vienna, and University College London, she has worked internationally as a curator both independently and within institutions. From 2019 to 2021 she served as Curator at MOSTYN, Wales and from 2013 to 2017 as Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. She has also worked at the Barbican Art Gallery, London and Generali Foundation, Vienna. As a writer she has contributed to numerous monographic catalogues as well as publications such as Art Basel, Arcane, Art Monthly, Frieze, May Revue and Mousse. She sits on the Board of the Jacqueline de Jong Foundation and is currently working on a presentation of films by Canadian artist G.B. Jones at Air de Paris in late 2025.
