For NADA Villa Warsaw 2025 Dürst Britt & Mayhew is proud to present a selection of historical works by the late Jacqueline de Jong (1939-2024) and recent textile pieces by Paul Beumer.
In 1992 Jacqueline de Jong started with a commission for a branch of the Dutch National Bank in the province of Friesland. She was fascinated by the many shipyards in the area, where skûtsjes (fishing boats) were built and thus she came across various discarded pieces of sailcloth. The commission started a further series of works on sailcloth, including the work 'Untitled', which is on show at NADA Villa Warsaw. This large piece of painted unstretched sailcloth, depicts a hanging woman in the process of cutting her throat. Inspiration came from the opera ‘Madame Butterfly’ by Puccini, for which in 1988 the Dutch opera had commissioned De Jong to create a poster and programme book. The work also refers back to De Jong's seminal 'Suicidal' paintings from the 1960s.
In Warsaw the piece serves as a theatrical staging for a series of small black and white Indian ink drawings mounted on panel from 1973. The pieces belong to De Jong's 'TV Drawing' series, which she started in 1965. Around this time she was prompted by the befriended sculptor Pol Bury to watch television to allow the medium to infiltrate her work. However instead of going out to purchase a TV she made a series of ink drawings that read like visual white noise, all-over gestural scenes that merge what could be read as figures, writings and doodles. With a tongue in cheek nod to Bury she called them ‘TV Drawings’.
The two series presented at NADA show De Jong’s great agility to stage her haunting protagonists, be they humans or monsters, in diverse formats and materials.
Dutch artist Paul Beumer (1982), though formally trained in painting, abandoned a studio practice to explore his interest in non-western fabrics and textiles, traveling through Africa and Asia. In India and Sri Lanka particularly, he found that the textiles appeared akin to abstract paintings. At NADA Villa Warsaw a series of loose hanging textile pieces will be on show, which were handwoven by a female master weaver on Sri Lanka. On Beumer's instigation she added black and white threads in order to create colour gradients. Subsequently he cut up and combined differently coloured textiles to mimic landscapes where an imaginary sun seems to both rise and set.
Beumer is never interested in depicting something concrete or controlled but rather to convey a realm of awe and mystery. Hence his textile pieces are never finished to perfection; loose threads, irregular stitches or cuts, are all traces of the human hand. These are the elements that make the pieces come to life.
NADA Villa Warsaw is produced and organized by the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) in collaboration with NADA Members, Michał Kaczyński (Raster), Marta Kołakowska (LETO Gallery), and Joanna Witek-Lipka.
Set in a neo-baroque architectural landmark in the heart of Warsaw, this exhibition presents a unique opportunity to showcase diverse presentations from NADA’s international community of galleries, non-profits, and artists, and for participants to engage in the distinctive character of these spaces.
Warsaw's Gawronski Villa, also known as Gawronski Palace or Leszczynski Palace, was built in 1924, designed by Marcin Weinfeld in Neo-Baroque style. Between the wars, the palace housed the Dutch Embassy and Consulate and the Belgian Embassy.
