Folkert de Jong

Known for uncannily spooky figurative sculptures carved out of Styrofoam, Dutch artist Folkert de Jong makes his debut at Marc Straus gallery with two sparse installations featuring life-size renderings—a seated female ventriloquist and a upright boxer, respectively—in his signature style. The ventriloquist, dummy in her lap, is located in an otherwise empty space, while an adjacent gallery is occupied by the boxer along with a small glass-topped stool, holding drinking glasses and a liquor decanter cast in resin, and a pair of small framed silk-screens of advertisements—one for a spiritual healer, the other, for a clairvoyant. As it turns out, both the ventriloquist and her dummy depict former First Lady Jackie Kennedy, while the boxer portrays former World Heavyweight Champion Muhammed Ali—two icons of the tumultuous 1960s whose inclusion here is in keeping with the artist’s thematic exploration of how culture relates to politics and power, and to the collateral damage done by both.