Allen Jones

“The work came out of a preoccupation and a belief that it was possible to make a statement about the figure in the context of the artistic avant garde of the 60s. The mainstream thinking in art at the time, as postulated by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was that the march of modernism went from Mondrian to minimalism. I was friendly with many of the minimalists. I loved their work. But the idea that 40,000 years of humanity making figurative images should no longer be possible because of Donald Judd’s empty boxes was, and is, ridiculous.

Allen Jones was born in 1937 in Southampton. When he was three years old, the family moved to West London. Jones studied at Hornsey College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London from 1955 to 1960, where he was a fellow student of R. B. Kitaj and David Hockney. After only one year at the Royal Collage, he was expelled. In1964 he moved to New York, where, inspired by the sexually motivated popular illustration of the 1940s and 1950s, he developed his recognisable erotically-charged style. These illustrations fascinated him because the highly exaggerated bodies reminded him of German Expressionism, but in a highly commercial context. Jones explained his fascination as follows:

"Fetishism produced images that I liked because they were dangerous. They were about personal obsessions. They were outside the accepted canon of artistic expression and suggested new ways of representing the figure."

After returning to England in 1969, he began to work in sculpture. The same year, he created Hatstand, Table and Chair, a sculpture series that remains controversial to this day. The series shows provocative, life-size and realistic-looking female figures made of steel and fibreglass, which are tied up and function as pieces of furniture. There was a wave of criticism from the feminist scene. In her essay entitled You Don't Know What Is Happening, Do You Mr Jones? British filmmaker Laura Mulvey wrote that Jones is a sexist and fetishist acting out his sexual complexes through art. In 1978, the sculpture series once again hit the headlines when a museum visitor threw stink bombs at it.  Eight years later, on International Women's Day, Chair was damaged by paint stripper during an exhibition at the Tate Gallery. Despite its polemic nature, the series has great art-historical significance. Stanley Kubrick drew inspiration from it for the interior of the Korova Milk Bar in his film Clockwork Orange. Jones’ style would continue to be sought after in cinema. In 1975, Jones worked as a set designer in the French feature film Maîtresse. Karl Lagerfeld designed the costumes.

In 1986 he became an elected member of the Royal Academy of Arts. He has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout his career, including at the Serpentine Gallery (1979), the Barbican Art Gallery (1995), Kunsthaus Köln (2000), Tate Britain (2007) and the Royal Academy (2015). Since 1968, he has also regularly exhibitedat the documenta in Kassel.