Bertus Jonkers, Sculptor of Mini Metropolises
One of the strange, miniature cityscapes that Dutch artist Bertus Jonkers spent much of his life building is among the star attractions in Sous le vent de l'art brut 2: De Stadshof, an outsider art exhibition in Paris.
The Dutch artist Bertus Jonkers died in relative obscurity in 2001 in Utrecht, the city where he was born and spent most of his life, save a stint in Germany doing forced labor during World War II. But one of the strange, miniature cityscapes that he spent much of his life building is among the star attractions in Sous le vent de l’art brut 2: De Stadshof, an exhibition of some 350 works from the Dutch De Stadshof collection of outsider art currently on view at Paris’s Halle Saint Pierre.
“City” (1995–2000) features an eclectic conglomeration of tall buildings, tiny bungalows, monuments that resemble Egyptian and Aztec pyramids, Rubik’s cube-like houses, modernist glass structures, and other incongruous architectural oddities rendered in the artist’s trademark mix of sand, glue, cement, glass, paint, and tile. The intricate sculpture, which is installed alongside nearly abstract landscape paintings that you would never guess are by the same artist, is only a fraction of the size of Jonkers’s first, sprawling city sculpture.
He built his first diminutive metropolis, “Ideale Stad” (“Ideal City”), in his home in Utrecht between 1989 and 1992. It eventually became so big as to span the entire house, even spilling out into the garden. After Jonkers was forced to move into a nursing home in 1994, “Ideale Stad” was broken up, with the Centraal Museum in Utrecht acquiring part of it, and the Gent-based De Stadshof collection taking a large section.
Jonkers kept building small cities in his senior housing apartment, including the “City” currently on view in Paris. His paintings, by comparison, are sparing evocations of pristine natural landscapes, far removed from the small-scale urban jungles for which he is best known.
Bertus Jonkers’s work is on view in Sous le vent de l’art brut 2: De Stadshof which continues at the Halle Saint Pierre (2 rue Ronsard, Paris) through January 4, 2015.
