For nearly four decades Den Hartog has pushed the art historical and aesthetic foundations of experiential viewership beyond their limits. Her forms, both narrative and abstract, reveal systems underpinning much of what we take for granted as passive participants in their superstructures. From concretizing and exploding traditional notions of perspectival space in landscape painting to constructing new sculptural forms that reveal the unimagined strata beneath the urban environment, her work is an invitation to relinquish convention in visual experience, a phenomenology of reinvention.

Having completed her MFA at Claremont Graduate University in the mid-1980s, Den Hartog began experimenting with the revolutionary materials native to post-minimalism—rubber, polyurethane, aqua-resin, fiberglass, an effort that has remained integral to her practice through the present. These innovations serve as fodder for the reinforcement and breakdown of her own internal systems, informed by an almost alchemical understanding of humanity’s relationship to the natural and built environments. Earlier series in the 1980s and early 1990s employed nets, rubber balls, and poured rubber to ends both reflective and skeptical of the manmade industrial and its relationship to natural histories. Later works from the 1990s and 2000s incorporated cascading forms of polyurethane and resin that brought two-dimensional, art historical space into a new third dimension. And those most recent works reveal a physically and psychologically deeper unmaking, or reimagining, of human urban interventions. Each of these represents a time of deeply studied invention by the artist and an integral step toward her experiential revolution.

Jacci Den Hartog (b. 1962, Iowa) lives and works in Los Angeles. She has held solo exhibitions at STARS, Los Angeles (2022), Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles (2015, 2012, 2010); The Suburban, Chicago (with Mary Heilmann, 2012); Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles (2004, 2002, 2000, 1997, 1996); Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York (1999); and Sue Spaid Fine Art, Los Angeles (1993, 1993, 1991). Institutional solo exhibitions include Pasadena City College (2020), The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2000), San Francisco Art Institute (1998), and White Columns, New York (1995). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, amongst others.