Rainbow Theatre, 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.

A theme of theatricality unites a new series of powerful paintings, featuring shaped curves that accentuate spotlights and curtains. The shaped canvas underlines its objectivity, countering the pictorial illusion upon it. The picture is not the record of an event but is the event. As Jones described in October 2026, for him, “visualising performance on stage is itself a performance on canvas – both are a record of creative invention”

Figures dance across canvases, their bodies fragmented and shifting while audiences watch on from balconies. Rendered in a saturated palette of green, yellow, and red, the paintings transport the viewer to an intoxicating, dreamlike space. The painting Rainbow Theatre (2026) depicts legs whirring on stage in a colour-field of orange, pink and lime, while a dramatic profile of a face hovers in the deep-red velvet of the opera box. The psychologically loaded and startling work playfully evokes such forebears as René Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. The body parts in the painting, separated from their contexts, emphasise the body as object. Part of Jones’s ongoing inquiry into the nature of fetish, this detachment generates the energy of the image, suspended in space, somewhere between a fall/dance/somersault