Rachel Jones

Rachel Jones (born 1991) is a British visual artist. She has exhibited work in the UK at galleries and institutions including Thaddaeus Ropac, The Sunday Painter and the Royal Scottish Academy, and has been artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation (2019) and Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art in (2016). Her work is in collections of The Tate, Arts Council England, Hepworth Wakefield, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Biography Rachel Jones was born in Whitechapel, East London, and grew up in Essex. She studied at Glasgow School of Art, earning a BA Fine Art degree in 2013, and subsequently an MA in Fine Art from the Royal Academy Schools (2019). In a 2021 interview for Harper's Bazaar she was quoted as saying of her time at art school: "I learned a lot about how to interrogate my own thoughts and feelings through my practice, in a way that I hadn't before. ...I was trying to centre my experience as a Black woman in a space that is predominantly white and, ultimately, not designed for me to thrive." Her work has been described by art critic Louisa Buck as patrolling "a porous line between abstraction and the figurative ... rooted in the sheer joy of abstract colour, form and gesture", and Jones explains: "The things that I was most drawn to and moved by as a younger artist, and even as a child, often tended to be by Abstract Expressionist painters. I also responded to things that were abstract in the sense that they were removed from a reality that was day-to-day. ... you can use colour and shape and form to speak to people in a way that isn't about a spoken language—it's about emotion and inciting feelings that don't have to be explained or expressed. It's responsive, it's instinctive, and a core part of all of us. So for me, it came from a place of being intrigued by these things and understanding them as a base human desire, and wanting to figure out how I could fit within that history and explore my interest in representations of Blackness." Works by Jones are held in collections of The Tate, Arts Council England, the Hepworth Wakefield, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and she was a participant in the major 2021 exhibition Mixing it Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery in London's Southbank Centre, where she was one of the youngest artists in the show.