Bend the Knee, 2024

Coming of age during the cultural shifts of the 1960s, where he emerged as a central protagonist in British Pop, Jones has maintained a distinctive compulsion in depicting the body. Focusing on questions of visual perception, sexuality, and performance, his practice draws on fashion, advertising and cinema.

Theatricality unites a new series of dramatic paintings by Allen Jones. Figures dance across canvases, their bodies fragmented and shifting. Rendered in a saturated palette of green, yellow, and red, the paintings transport the viewer to an intoxicating, dreamlike space. As Jones described in October 2026: “The picture is not the record of the event but is the event. Visualising performance on stage is itself a performance on canvas – both are a record of creative invention”.

Bend the Knee (2024–25) is a arresting painting in a flame-like pallette of reds and yellow. The composition depicts a couple dancing – from their poses and dress, perhaps in a swing style to big band jazz. The stern expression and wagging finger of the female protagonist, along with the suggestive title, points to private pursuits away from the dance floor. The motif of bodies in movement merging togerther is a central thread across Jones’s career. In his monograph Moves (2025) Mark Hudson writes: “In the art of Allen Jones, men and women rarely stay in their contained spaces, bodies or identities for long. They collide, merge, conjoin, transition and interpenetrate in compulsive moves that have gone on almost from the start of Jones’s painting career: in the painting that can be inverted to reverse its dominant gender; the figure with one trouser leg, one stiletto.”