As rhythmic gestures caper and coalesce into a luminous and multi-layered visual field, Rachel Jones’ Red, Forged from 2023 unfurls as a kaleidoscopic symphony of colour and movement. Created on the occasion of the artist's first solo exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, that bore the same title, Jones’ complicated and consuming mark-making generates an intricate interplay between pattern, form, and chromatic intensity, inviting the viewer into a terrain of heightened sensation. Red, Forged is an experiential encounter, a moment of absorption in which the viewer becomes enveloped by its shifting surface. Swathes of riotous scarlet, deep vermilion, and warm magenta converge into fiercely energetic passages, while flickers of cooler hues offer a jolting counterpoint, yet resolve into a homogenous whole. Occasionally Jones’ engulfing strokes are frenetic, elsewhere they are layered and blended, but throughout experimentation is palpable. The resulting dynamism simultaneously excites and unsettles, as the viewer is confronted with a composition that pulses with a synesthetic vitality, much like an arrangement of notes in a score.

Red, Forged belongs to a broader body of work in which Jones pushes colour to its limits, creating what she terms “sensory landscapes” – canvases that communicate through pigment, rhythm, and abstraction rather than narrative or figuration. While previous works have incorporated figurative references – most notably the mouth as a site of interiority and vulnerability – Red, Forged belongs to a lineage of Jones’ paintings that explore abstraction as a means of evoking emotion. The artist notes: "abstraction allows me to explore identity in an experiential way, using colour, texture, and line to stimulate the physical and psychological responses of the viewer" (Ibid). Deeply engaged in the discourse of identity politics, cultural histories, and how lived experiences are both constructed and felt, the present work sees pattern and colour take precedence, guiding the eye through a layered and undulating surface in which textures shift and morph in response to the artist’s hand. Jones’ process is both physical and emotional, tied together with an intuitive sense for equilibrium. Listening to music when she paints, Jones lyrically builds her surfaces through a process of layering oil stick and oil pastel, blending directly onto the canvas to achieve bold tonal contrasts and rich textural variation of pure unadulterated pigment.

The same rigorous inquiry that Jones applies to questions of identity and selfhood extends to the very language of painting itself, as she continuously reconsiders both historical and contemporary approaches to colour, form, and abstraction through a multifaceted array of influences. The artist comments: "I've always been drawn to the work of different painters, including Gillian Ayres, SOiL Thornton, Lynette Yiadom Boakye, Aubrey Williams, Bill Traylor and Martha Jungwirth, but I've been exploring broader artistic practices - sculpture, performance, music. What I read matters too, and I admire writers like Toni Morrison, Kevin Quashie, Claudia Rankine, and Gwendolyn Brooks for their use of language to achieve critical and poetic expression that reconfigures our common understanding of the black lived experience” (Ibid). To liken her practice to any Abstract Expressionist or Old Master would indeed be reductive. Jones exists in a singular plane, in which her approach continues to redefine the scope and impact of contemporary painting, forging a language that is at once deeply personal and profoundly universal.

Born in 1991, Jones studied at the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts in London before rapidly establishing herself as a leading force in contemporary painting. Her forthcoming exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2025 – a landmark moment as the institution’s first-ever solo contemporary show in its main exhibition space – further underscores her critical and institutional recognition. Jones’ paintings have been presented alongside artists including Peter Doig, Hurvin Anderson, Lubaina Himid, Somaya Critchlow and Issy Wood, and with recent solo exhibitions at the Long Museum in Shanghai (2023), the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco (2024), and Chisenhale Gallery in London (2024), Jones continues to expand the reach of her practice, pushing abstraction into new and deeply resonant terrain. At the age of thirty one years old, her work now resides in some of the most prestigious museum collects ions in the United Kingdom and the United States, including Tate, London (lick your teeth, they so clutch, 2021), Arts Council England, London (lick your teeth, they so clutch, 2021), The Museum of Replica Handbags s, Houston (lick your teeth, they so clutch, 2021), and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (A Sliced Tooth, 2020).