Early Life and Artistic Training

Bart Jonkers was born on 20 maart 1920 in Utrecht. His early years were spent working as a house-painter, a trade that kept his hands busy with the practicalities of color and surface. This period of manual labor preceded a shift toward formal study. He eventually attended the Artibus academy of art in Utrecht, where he began to refine his technical skills and develop his own way of seeing.

The course of his life was interrupted by the onset of World War II. During the conflict, Jonkers was forced to work in Germany. This period of forced labor took him away from his home and his developing practice. Upon returning to Utrecht after the war, he turned his focus entirely toward art, moving away from the practicalities of house painting to pursue a dedicated vocation in creative work.

Artistic Style and Diverse Techniques

His hands moved between many different forms, shifting from the flat surface of a canvas to the heavy textures of relief and object art. Early on, his focus rested on the quiet observation of landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. As time passed, his work drifted toward abstraction and the construction of assemblages. He did not stick to a single medium, instead working through drawings, engravings, and even the written word in poetry and artist books. There was a constant, restless impulse to build new worlds, often driven by a sense of spirituality and a search for a more harmonious existence.

The materials he chose were tactile and unpretentious. He worked with sand, gypsum, glue, and cement, mixing them with glass, paint, and tile to create physical depth. These substances allowed him to move beyond simple painting into the realm of sculptural reliefs. His technical skill was evident in how he handled these gritty, everyday elements, turning them into intricate structures. He had a way of layering these materials to give his work a sense of weight and presence that felt both imagined and deeply grounded.

The Creation of Miniature Metropolises

Between 1989 and 1992, Jonkers transformed his living space into a sprawling urban environment. This construction, known as Ideale Stad, The Ideal City, or City of Devotion, grew from a collection of small materials like sand, gypsum, glue, cement, glass, paint, and tile. The miniature metropolis eventually claimed the floor, the walls, and the ceiling of his house. It climbed up the stairs and spilled out into the garden. In 1990, a portion of this work was exhibited at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.

After moving to a smaller apartment, his focus shifted toward a more compact scale. From 1995 to 2000, he built another miniature metropolis titled The City. These architectural oddities featured a mix of tall buildings, tiny bungalows, and monuments that resembled Egyptian or Aztec pyramids. He used a variety of textures and shapes, including Rubik’s cube-like houses and modernist glass structures, to build these intricate, crowded landscapes.

Key Works and Artistic Legacy

His hands moved through sand, gypsum, and cement to build worlds that occupied the very floor and walls of his living space. Between 1989 and 1992, he constructed Ideale Stad, a miniature metropolis that eventually spilled out into his garden. This sprawling construction was so significant that the Centraal Museum in Utrecht acquired a portion of it, measuring 4.15 x 5.35 meters. Later, in a more compact form, he produced The City between 1995 and 2000.

Other works reveal a shift in focus and material. He produced Symmetrie-20 from 1965 to 1966 and Tempel van God Olifant in 1986. His long-term engagement with certain forms is seen in Bomen, a work spanning from 1950 to 2000. These pieces, alongside his drawings and poems, reflect a life spent building intricate, often incongruous architectural oddities.

The preservation of his output is managed by the Dutch outsider art foundation De Stadshof. This collection ensures that his specific way of seeing the world remains intact. His legacy is held in various places, including the dr Guislain museum in Gent and Halle Saint Pierre in Paris.

Later Years and Death

In 1994, the scale of Jonkers's work shifted when he moved into a home for the elderly. The sprawling, intricate environments that had once occupied the floors and walls of his house were left behind, with parts of his earlier constructions moving into the care of the Centraal Museum and the De Stadshof collection. Even within the confines of a small apartment, his hands remained busy. He continued his creative activities, working on more compact versions of his miniature metropolises, such as the one known as "The City," which he worked on between 1995 and 2000.

He remained in Utrecht, the city where he had lived for most of his life. He passed away there on 7 maart 2001. At the time of his death, he lived in relative obscurity, a quiet end for a man who had spent his final years building small, detailed worlds in the limited space available to him.