A defining figure of British Pop Art, Jones emerged at the forefront of a generation that transformed British visual culture in the early 1960s. Across more than six decades, his distinctive and often provocative approach to the human figure—in painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography—has continually challenged conventional distinctions between surface and form, image and object.

At the heart of In Town Tonight is a new series of shaped canvas paintings that brings the theatricality of performance into Jones’s latest work. A palette of intense green, yellow and red transports the viewer into the theatre, where dramatic spotlights pick out the sinuous bodies of performers on stage, observed by audiences from opera boxes. In works including Double Take (2024–26) and Watch This Space (2025–26), bodies appear as fragments, gestures and silhouettes within fields of saturated colour, while the contours of the shaped canvases become active elements of the compositions.

The exhibition continues this investigation of performance and the body through a series of standing and figurative sculptures in transparent and coloured acrylic plastic, arranged catwalk-style on the first floor. Inspired in part by Roman-era statues Jones encountered at the Louvre, which had been turned against the wall because of their nakedness, the sculptures shift according to the viewer’s position. Their curved, box-like bodies and dramatically shaped heads operate simultaneously as figures and objects of display, with some functioning as vitrines containing stiletto heels and painted panel sections. Box Set (2017), for example, incorporates a direct homage to the paintings of René Magritte.

The relationship between the body, object and viewer is further explored through a new series of Shadow Photographs (2026). Dramatic lighting transforms the sculptures into compositions of exaggerated line, shadow, colour, and silhouette, extending Jones’s longstanding interest in the constructed nature of representation.

Jones’s engagement with the human figure has always existed at the intersection of sexuality, representation, and performance, and has generated debate around the ways the female body is presented and viewed. In the new works, these longstanding concerns are approached through theatricality, fragmentation and shifting perspectives. Rather than revisiting the visual language of the past, Jones continues to test how the figure can be transformed through colour, light, scale and the physical properties of the artwork itself.

Jones came of age within an exceptional generation associated with the rise of British Pop Art, alongside artists including Pauline Boty, Derek Boshier, Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj and Peter Phillips. Emerging amid the cultural shifts of post-war Britain, these artists turned towards the rapidly expanding imagery of contemporary life—from advertising, magazines and cinema to fashion, music and photography— challenging established distinctions between fine art and popular culture while developing markedly individual approaches to representation.

From the outset, Jones developed an unmistakably individual visual language. Popular imagery converged with a fascination with the human body, movement, sexuality, and performance, alongside a sophisticated engagement with twentieth-century Modernism. He also questioned the conventional limits of painting itself, treating the canvas not simply as a surface for an image but as a physical object whose shape could become integral to the composition.

This enquiry runs throughout In Town Tonight. Alongside the new works, significant pieces from earlier decades trace Jones’s continuing experiments with painting, sculpture and the figure. Backdrop (2016–17) incorporates a female fashion mannequin within an expressive colour-field painting and wooden set, deliberately destabilising the distinction between image and object.

The exhibition also builds upon Gazelli Art House’s engagement with the generation that reshaped British visual culture in the 1960s, including Derek Boshier, Pauline Boty and Jann Haworth. While their practices were distinct, they shared an openness to the changing visual world around them and a willingness to dismantle established hierarchies between fine art and popular culture. Jones’s practice, meanwhile, has continued to pursue the human figure as a shifting territory between painting, object and image.

Now in his late eighties, Jones continues to expand the visual language he helped establish more than sixty years ago. In Town Tonight brings this remarkable trajectory into dialogue with a substantial body of new work, demonstrating that his engagement with the figure is not a return to the past, but an ongoing process of reinvention.