Rachel Jones (artist)
Rachel Jones (born 1991) is a British visual artist. She has exhibited work in the UK at galleries and institutions including Thaddaeus Ropac, The Sunday Painter and the Royal Scottish Academy, and has been artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation (2019) and Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art in (2016). Her work is in collections of The Tate, Arts Council England, Hepworth Wakefield, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Biography. Rachel Jones was born in Whitechapel, East London, and grew up in Essex. She studied at Glasgow School of Art , earning a BA Fine Art degree in 2013, and subsequently an MA in Fine Art from the Royal Academy Schools (2019). In a 2021 interview for "Harper's Bazaar" she was quoted as saying of her time at art school: "I learned a lot about how to interrogate my own thoughts and feelings through my practice, in a way that I hadn't before. ...I was trying to centre my experience as a Black woman in a space that is predominantly white and, ultimately, not designed for me to thrive." Her work has been described by art critic Louisa Buck  as patrolling "a porous line between abstraction and the figurative ... rooted in the sheer joy of abstract colour, form and gesture", and Jones explains: "The things that I was most drawn to and moved by as a younger artist, and even as a child, often tended to be by Abstract Expressionist painters. I also responded to things that were abstract in the sense that they were removed from a reality that was day-to-day. ... you can use colour and shape and form to speak to people in a way that isn't about a spoken language—it's about  emotion and inciting feelings that don't have to be explained or expressed. It's responsive, it's instinctive, and a core part of all of us. So for me, it came from a place of being intrigued by these things and understanding them as a base human desire, and wanting to figure out how I could fit within that history and explore my interest in representations of Blackness." Works by Jones are held in collections of The Tate, Arts Council England, the Hepworth Wakefield, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and she  was a participant in the major 2021 exhibition "Mixing it Up: Painting Today" at the Hayward Gallery in London's Southbank Centre, where she was one of the youngest artists in the show. As one review noted: "At Hayward Gallery's group exhibition "Mixing it Up: Painting Today"—a who's who of Britain's emerging painters—you'd have done well not to be stopped in your tracks by the vibrant, sprawling paintings of Rachel Jones. Her monumental, unstretched canvases comprise layered passages of competing oil stick and oil paint, with a tendency towards bold crimson backgrounds, their surfaces overlaid with  scumbled gestural patterns in bright colours. ... she has fast become one of Britain's top younger painters." More recently, her well-received first solo show, held at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in London, prompted the "Evening Standard" to comment: "The 30-year-old Essex-based artist also has a Chisenhale Gallery show coming around the corner and, ahead of that, this exhibition, SMIIILLLLEEEE, in one of Europe’s biggest commercial galleries. And no wonder there's so much excitement about her: Jones is already a distinctive voice, creating ravishingly colourful works with intriguing subject matter.. ... this is hugely impressive stuff ." Caroline Douglas of Contemporary Art Society said: "For her latest London exhibition, Rachel Jones brings not just paintings but words and music references to scaffold her work in the here and now. ... The sensual, as well as the symbolic, power of the mouth and teeth have become the way the artist uses to speak about her ethnicity, and her experience of being a Black woman in the world today."