Jeroen Jongeleen

In 2003, Jongeleen moved to Paris where he stayed at Atelier Holboer. Here he expended his contact with the Paris pre-street art scene resulting into the Art of Urban Warfare. Jongeleen's street interventions carry the project name “influenza”, functioning as well as a semi-anonymous signature. The alias “Influenza” connotes his repeated attacks on the well-oiled social body, while qualifying the development of his artistic practice as a self-reflexive exercise engaged in feeding its own momentum.

In 1997 he moved to Rotterdam. Here he did one of his first interventions in public space. With a spray can he wrote the word ‘HOME’ on the outside wall of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. He was arrested for this action, but it was the start of a close relationship with the museum. In 1999 he participated in the group exhibition Exorcism/Aesthetic Terrorism, 2000 in the Boijmans Van Beuningen.

Jongeleen lives and works in Rotterdam and Paris. He studied at the AKI Academy for Art and Design in Enschede, where he graduated in 1994.

Jeroen Jongeleen (born 2 November 1967, Apeldoorn) is a Dutch artist. His artwork has been influenced by graffiti art and textual art and is often created in public space. In his artworks Jongeleen criticizes today’s over regulated society.

Jongeleen's work is clearly inspired by the ideas of the Situationist International (SI), a revolutionary group, founded in 1957, which reached its peak of influence in the general strike of May 1968 in France. During the Paris uprising the influential leader of this group was the writer and theorist Guy Debord (1931-1994). His influential and renowned work Society of the Spectacle is considered to be the cause for the uprising. Like the Situationists, Jongeleen turns against consumerism and over-regulated society by interrupting the public space. Utilizing means and visual forms associated with guerilla protest – graffiti, stickers and placard cut-outs – his interventions draw attention to a particular form of militant activism while questioning the nature, value and transformative potential of artistic production.