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Rachel Jones is manhandling a canvas that reaches the ceiling of her east London studio when I arrive. She moves it out from behind a stack of paintings and manoeuvres it against the wall, then does the same with a second work. But something isn’t right. “They’re upside down,” she says regretfully. After more turning, Jones gets the canvases into the right position. Together, they show a set of teeth and a red-pink tongue, surrounded by swaths of unpainted linen, patches of bright blue and flashes of neon yellow. Like most of Jones’s work, it seems wildly abstract at first, then invites you to see new forms and shapes.
Looking at the canvases, I can’t help thinking of Mickey Mouse’s pet bloodhound Pluto. Jones’s work has often featured gaping, toothy mouths as a way into ideas around expression and the self, but the tongue is a new motif. It “only features when the mouth is open really wide”, says Jones. “There’s an idea of something quite energetic or intense happening in the activity of the painting.” The work is from her Gated Canyons series, part of which will go on display at Dulwich Picture Gallery this June. The final paintings are away being photographed, but even in their absence, the studio is crammed with works-in-progress.
Jones is having a moment. Or, more accurately, she’s having another in a series of moments that have been happening since she graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2019. The year after, she was taken on by Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, which has Alex Katz and Anselm Kiefer on its roster, and the Tate acquired one of her paintings for its permanent collection. The following years saw two of her unstretched canvases included in the Hayward Gallery’s survey of contemporary painting, and one of her works sell at auction for £910,000 (its pre-sale estimate was £40,000 to £60,000). She quietly left Thaddaeus Ropac in 2023 to go solo, a surprising move for a young artist being championed by a prestigious commercial gallery. Since then, she has put on an opera (based on a novel by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black writer to win a Pulitzer), designed the 2024 Brit Award and been shot by Juergen Teller for Loewe’s SS24 campaign. As well as the Dulwich exhibition, Jones has been commissioned by the Courtauld Gallery to make two new works for its entrance and ticket halls this autumn, and she has just finished a show at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, her first on the US West Coast. At 35, she is about as successful as a young painter can be.
It’s clear that Jones takes nothing for granted, though. I’m struck by her energy, warmth and thoughtfulness. She is the kind of cool person who’s confident enough to be enthusiastic about things. And she’s enthusiastic about a lot, professing a love for everything from Bugs Bunny to Tina Turner and Tchaikovsky. Likewise, her style is striking: she’s wearing a faintly combative combination of camouflage leggings and a cream top. It doesn’t seem like an accident. Even when she’s talking animatedly about karaoke, there’s a steely undertone to her: a sense of wanting to do things her way, once she’s worked out what that is.
Jones grew up in Brentwood, Essex, the child of a father who worked in IT and a journalist mother. She loved cartoons and drawing as a child, and at first she thought she would be an animator, driven partly by the desire for a stable job. A summer programme in New York when she was 17 put a stop to that: “I realised that I hated animation, it’s so tedious!” Jones nervously told her mother that she wanted to be an artist and set off to study painting at the Glasgow School of Art.
I expect her to dodge the question of why she left Thaddaeus Ropac, but she’s disarmingly open. She relished the chance to make shows and place works in public institutions, she says, but the grind of producing and exhibiting was not for her. “I never really wanted representation when I left the RA, but I felt overwhelmed and clueless about how to manage the decisions about where I exhibited my work.” She obviously feels strongly about reaching beyond a Mayfair-gallery-going audience and doesn’t like “the idea that painting sits in its own little part of visual culture… I just think that is a redundant way to understand art.” (Asked about her departure, the gallery politely declines to comment.) My impression, also, is that having figured out how the commercial-art world operates, Jones was hungry for other experiences.
Which explains how she became one of the faces of a fashion campaign. She found being photographed by Juergen Teller for Loewe “really weird”, but also fascinating. She has friends in fashion and was prepared for a long shoot, but Teller took the pictures “in basically 10 minutes” on his iPhone. “I had a gleeful response to that, because I move really quickly and have a very strong sense of direction when I’m making a work.”
The Dulwich exhibition is an evolution for her. The show draws on references from the Looney Tunes universe and Disney, but here she’s also used a painting from the gallery’s collection as a prompt: Pieter Boel’s Head of a Hound, painted around 1660. Responding to the historic work has been part of a broader process of becoming “more invested in being able to look at something and understand how to express my internal response”. Jane Findlay, curator of the exhibition, says that when she saw Jones’s work at Chisenhale Gallery in 2022, “I was blown away by it. I had a really visceral reaction that stayed with me for a long time.” She highlights how Jones is “upending a lot of painting traditions, she’s blurring the line between abstraction and figuration” and “expressing things that we feel but often remain unspoken”. Jones wants the viewer to encounter the works in certain conditions. She’s very picky about how they’re hung, preferring them at different heights. She wants the viewer to “move around them with your eyes, but also your body… There’s a lot of movement in me making them, so I encourage that in the viewing experience.”
But she has no desire to influence how others interpret her paintings. “As much as people want me to speak for the work, that isn’t my job and it’s not something I want to do,” she says. But she is pleased by particular reactions. She once invited a curator to the studio and showed her a painting made up of bright reds and acid yellows. Jones was “overjoyed” to discover that the curator “found it overwhelming. After about 15 minutes, she was like, ‘Can you put that away now, please?’” Children, she says, are also excellent at responding and, again, she is delighted when they find her work “quite scary” or “difficult to look at”. There is a freedom in not having to please.
For Jones, a painting is finished when it’s “good enough – there’s always more that can be done. There’s got to be a sense for me that something else could be done,” which she calls the “dot dot dot”. Letting go and moving on matters. And Jones has a lot to move on to.
Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons is at Dulwich Picture Gallery from 10 June to 19 October
