Allen Jones
Allen Jones (1937– ) is a contemporary British Pop artist best known for his figurative paintings, sculptures, and lithography. Jones’s work is characterized by its sexual imagery and interest in traditional male and female power dynamics, alternating between celebrating and satirizing fetishes and BDSM practices. Born in the English city of Southampton and raised in West London’s district of Ealing, Jones was interested in art from a young age, and in 1955, he studied painting and lithography at the Hornsey College of Art in London, from which he graduated in 1959. During his studies, Jones traveled to Paris and the French region of Provence and was especially influenced by the art of Robert Delaunay. As a pioneering British Pop artist, Jones produced remarkable paintings and prints in the late 1950s and early 1960s and enjoyed combining different visual languages to reveal the historical constructions underlying them.
Jones represented the UK at the Paris Biennale in 1963, where he was awarded the Prix de Jeunes Artistes. The Southampton Solent University awarded Jones the Honorary Doctor of Arts award in 2017. In 1978, a retrospective of his work was shown at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and the Serpentine Gallery, London. Another retrospective exhibition of his complete graphic works was exhibited in 1995 at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, which for three years toured the world under the sponsorship of the British Council.
Presently based in London, Jones’s works are held in many international collections, including the Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum as well as Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Museum of 20th-Century Art in Vienna, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and many others.