Flying High, 2026

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 an event but is the event. Visualising performance on stage is itself a performance on canvas – both are a record of creative invention”.

The painting Flying High (2026) sees a male figure in blue fall or leap towards the legs of a brightly lit figure on stage. In doing so blue protagonist morps into a curved form, evoking the grammatical figure of a question mark, or perhaps, more threateningly, a hook. The bodies collapse into each other, which could be read as either a violent collision or a unification into a new whole. This work continues Jones’s longstanding interest in the visual comingling of bodies, and in expressing gender through colour symbolism and signs.