Acclaimed artist Rachel Jones will create two new site-specific commissions for the Entrance and Ticketing Hall of The Courtauld Gallery, to be unveiled on 25 September 2025. This conversation will offer new insight into recent developments in Jones’s practice and the work that she has been making towards her forthcoming commissions.
This talk will explore Rachel Jones’s processes and materials, especially her use of pastel and oil sticks to create monumental inner landscapes defined by their distinctively rich and carefully balanced colours and textures and the coalescing of competing gestural and structured mark-making. The conversation will also address Jones’s broad range of inspirations, from her dialogues with works in The Courtauld’s collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings to her interest in the expressive and graphic qualities of cartoons. There will also be scope to discuss other recent aspects of Rachel’s practice, including her long-term work with singers and musicians towards the staging of an opera.
Rachel Jones (b. 1991) was born and lives in London. She studied Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. Recent solo exhibitions include Rachel Jones, !!!!!, Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, US (2024), Rachel Jones, a shorn root, Long Museum, Shanghai, China (2023), and Rachel Jones, say cheeeeese, Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK (2022). A solo exhibition of Jones’s work, Gated Canyons, will open at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, on 10 June. Her new site-specific commissions for The Courtauld Gallery will be on view free of charge from 25 September 2025.
Elena Crippa is Curator of Contemporary Art: Exhibitions and Projects at The Courtauld Gallery. She was previously Head of Exhibitions at London’s Whitechapel Gallery and Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art at Tate Britain, where her exhibitions included: All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life (2018); Frank Bowling (2019); Paula Rego (2021); and the 2022 commission Hew Locke: The Procession.
Organised by Elena Crippa in preparation for the opening of Rachel Jones’s site-specific installation at the Courtauld Gallery.
