Rachel Jones’ Tactile Surfaces at Long Museum West Bund

Long Museum West Bund Shanghai Follow +

In the flesh, Rachel Jones’ intensely hued paintings have the texture of a tapestry. Heavy, chaotic strokes of oil stick converge with moments of flat colour to render fantastically vibrant abstractions.

Coinciding with Thaddaeus Ropac’s recent display of Jones’ work at Art Basel Hong Kong 2023, Rachel Jones: a shorn root (18 March–28 May 2023) at Shanghai’s Long Museum West Bund is the British artist’s first solo exhibition in China.

The exhibition gathers 20 new works inspired by her infatuation with teeth and the mouth. Starting from the shape of a single tooth belonging to her friend, the paintings explore the varying complexities—cultural, historical, and bodily—of identity and a sense of the self.

Jones says her practice is informed by the communication of ‘ideas about the interiority of Black bodies and their lived experience’.

In paintings like a shorn root (2022), Jones explores these ideas by using the motif of a tooth—a structure found in the mouth, a site of contact between the interior and external realms of the body—as a symbol of Black interior experience. Jones’ vivid use of colour demands onlookers to bring their own lived experiences and diversity to their understanding of her work.

Considerably new to the art market, Jones’ work is in high demand with her painting A Slow Teething (2020) selling at Sotheby’s London’s evening sale in 2022 for £617,400 (US $760,776), a significantly higher figure than its estimated £50,000 to £70,000 (US $61,608–$86,251).

Main image: Rachel Jones, a shorn root (2022) (detail). Oil stick, oil pastel on canvas(unstretched). 185 x 316 cm. © Rachel Jones. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg/Seoul. Photo: Eva Herzog.