Join us for the private view: 15 October, 6 — 8 PM (BST)
Gazelli Art House announces In Town Tonight, the first solo exhibition by Allen Jones RA (b. 1937, Southampton) with the gallery, opening during Frieze Week in London. Bringing together a substantial body of new work made between 2024 and 2026 with significant works from across his career, the exhibition presents Jones as an artist whose investigation of the human figure, performance, and the relationship between image and object remains in active evolution.
A defining figure of British Pop Art, Jones emerged at the forefront of a generation that transformed British visual culture in the early 1960s. Across more than six decades, his distinctive and often provocative approach to the human figure—in painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography—has continually challenged conventional distinctions between surface and form, image and object.
At the heart of In Town Tonight is a new series of shaped canvas paintings that brings the theatricality of performance into Jones’s latest work. A palette of intense green, yellow and red transports the viewer into the theatre, where dramatic spotlights pick out the sinuous bodies of performers on stage, observed by audiences from opera boxes. In works including Double Take (2024–26) and Watch This Space (2025–26), bodies appear as fragments, gestures and silhouettes within fields of saturated colour, while the contours of the shaped canvases become active elements of the compositions. The exhibition continues this investigation of performance and the body through a series of standing and figurative sculptures in transparent and coloured acrylic plastic, arranged catwalk-style on the first floor. Inspired in part by Roman-era statues Jones encountered at the Louvre, which had been turned against the wall because of their nakedness, the sculptures shift according to the viewer’s position. Their curved, box-like bodies and dramatically shaped heads operate simultaneously as figures and objects of display, with some functioning as vitrines containing stiletto heels and painted panel sections. Box Set (2017), for example, incorporates a direct homage to the paintings of René Magritte.
The relationship between the body, object and viewer is further explored through a new series of Shadow Photographs (2026). Dramatic lighting transforms the sculptures into compositions of exaggerated line, shadow, colour, and silhouette, extending Jones’s longstanding interest in the constructed nature of representation.
