Der Falsche Prophet Folkert de Jong

 

Der Falsche Prophet represents the last scene of a story about a game between good and evil. The dice have broken to pieces, the house-of-cards has fallen; game over. Central to the installation is a 19th century carriage with stained glass windows. Completing the scene are grotesquely rendered male figures and a ship model of the Spanish Armada: a reference to an age where the colonization of the planet was rapidly accelerating, almost every corner of the world had been discovered, and a large part converted to Christianity.

 

Barricaded with wood, doors, old books, helmets and furniture, the horseless carriage stands still in the middle of what looks like a pile of junk. Emerging out of the chaos of these objects and hypnotically turning around their axis, caricatured human heads – chopped off and put on stakes – remain like monuments to what were once glorious players.

 

With his work Folkert De Jong evokes events from the past that reflect upon the present. His sculptures are monumental in scale yet, at the same time, constructed from fragile and ordinary materials.

 

Folkert De Jong was born in Alkmaar, the Netherlands in 1972. He attended the Rijks Academy for Visual Arts, Amsterdam and took third prize in 2003 for the Prix de Rome for Sculpture in the Netherlands.