A few weeks ago I reviewed the exhibition devoted to Rachel Jones at Dulwich Picture Gallery. More recently, visiting the Courtauld Gallery I learned that Jones was commissioned to create two big paintings to be placed on permanent display in their public spaces, to be precise, in the John Browne Entrance Hall and the Ticketing Hall. Jones’s work is very bold and colourful so the two works certainly brighten up these newly refurbished and rather sterile spaces.
Rachel Jones in the John Browne Entrance Hall: ‘Struck’ by Rachel Jones (2025) courtesy of the artist. Photo by Fergus Carmichael, The Courtauld
Jones is London born and bred. She was born in 1991. She’s become known for the size of her canvases and her confident use of really bold bright colours in what, at first sight, appear to be entirely abstract designs. That’s what came over at the Dulwich Gallery show.
She combines pastel and oil stick to create great swirls and swoops of colour which can, from a certain angle, have a psychedelic feel. The Dulwich show brought out that she used the smile, the human smile displaying big bold teeth, as a central motif, managing to convert this big curved shape into a kind of landscape, a swirling, melting landscape which has a distant relationship, maybe, to Salvador Dali’s melting landscapes.
But for these two new works that big smile motif is not visible. Instead, as she explains in the video interview (below) she was inspired by the location to engage with the Courtauld’s dazzling collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings.
She describes Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889) in The Courtauld’s collection as her favourite and most inspiring work in a London public collection, ‘the epitome of how to use colour, texture and a sense of self to create an image’ – which is interesting enough, but doesn’t really explain the feel of her two works here.
Rachel Jones in Ticketing Hall: ‘Struck’ by Rachel Jones (2025) Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Fergus Carmichael, The Courtauld
Thoughts
I sort of liked them, as I sort of liked the works in the Dulwich show. I can see how she has, surprisingly, created a distinctive style when you would have thought this kind of abstraction would be exhausted by now. This feels like a real achievement, and I respect it and admire it. But I don’t really like it, try though I may.
And there’s a second factor here, which is the location. I really don’t like the refurbished entrance hall and ticket hall of the Courtauld. The old layout was much warmer and friendlier. So I think Jones’s two pieces, big though they are, struggle to make themselves felt in these big, white, classical, empty, echoing spaces. They don’t own the spaces at all, they felt (to me) rather lost.
If you find yourself at that end (the East end) of Covent Garden or the Strand, go, see, make up your own mind. The entrance hall space they hang in is free to stroll into, although be warned that if you want to enter the gallery proper, that costs £11. Although the Courtauld’s newly rehung collection of Post-Impressionist painting is well worth a visit any time in its own right…
Video
Related links
- Rachel Jones’s two works at the Courtauld Gallery are on permanent display
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