Mariejon de Jong-Buijs (b. 1970, Netherlands) lives and works in Basel, Switzerland. She earned a bachelor’s degree in art education in the Netherlands in 1994 and a master’s degree in fine arts from the Institute Art Gender Nature in Basel, Switzerland, in 2015. Her works have been exhibited in Switzerland, Europe, and the United States.
The process-oriented work of Mariejon de Jong-Buijs is deeply rooted in the tradition of Dutch landscape painting. This physical inspiration stems both from her experience working on farms and from a long visual immersion in the history of this genre. Rather than depicting the landscape, she seeks to connect with it through memory. Her large-scale paintings are characterized by saturated colors, geometric shapes, recurring motifs, and folded canvases.
She explores abstraction in dialogue with geometric minimalism, using color as a tool for creating marks. Employing unconventional techniques, she paints with tractors, sprayers, brooms, and her own body. For her, painting is a process-based act in which she performs specific actions to make the fluidity and impermanence of painting visible. Layers of color accumulate, residues adhere, and marks emerge, revealing the act of making. Recurring actions unfold on the canvas, emphasizing time and transformation.
While remaining faithful to the tradition of painting on canvas, she constantly seeks ways to push painting beyond the easel.