RACHEL JONES AT DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY

"While earlier works rely on the viewer losing themselves in dense abstraction, a 'less is more' approach sharpens Jones' imagery." writes Jemima Jenkins.

Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2025. Photo: Eva Herzog.

I first encountered Rachel Jones’ work in 2021 at the Hayward Gallery’s Mixing It Up: Painters Today exhibition. Lick your teeth, they so clutch (2021) was the title of the piece featured in the show and the one that comes to mind when I hear the artist’s name- a psychedelic tapestry of hyper-saturated abstraction. The scorching visual impression of Jones’ work is long-lasting. 

Gated Canyons at Dulwich Picture Gallery marks Rachel Jones' first institutional solo show in the UK. Taking place in the gallery’s exhibition space and responding to the gallery’s existing collection, Jones’ work is the first by a contemporary artist to be hung on its pearly whites. The mouth has been a long-standing preoccupation of Jones’ work and proves to be a full blown obsession in this retrospective. Jones is interested in the mouth’s myriad forms as it contorts to reflect extreme emotional states; the outline of the mouth is drawn onto the canvas and creates the portal, through which an emotional landscape is conceived.

Rachel Jones, Gated Canyon, 2024

Three wall-sized diptychs tower in the opening room. Jones’ tricks take inebriating effect: the buttery lick of oil-stick, woozy mark making and an abundance of colour. The show commences with fresh work made in 2024, turning her signature drawing utensil to a new motif, bricks. Their crude form lends itself to the recent influence of cartoon in her practice, injecting her paintings with the psychological extremity and aesthetic whimsy of animation. A heart shaped mouth protrudes from a wall of bricks, animated with their wry curled-up corners and Bugs Bunny-esque teeth. Jones roots her composition in the solidity of a brick wall, only to playfully subvert it and let the illimitable colours of feeling seep through its porous surface. Turquoise and red throb with a thermographic vibrancy. 

Rachel Jones, Tender Crags, 2022

A fun-house effect emerges from the shift in scale as I follow through to a longer room. Here, intimate works summon the viewer to engage in up-close looking. The central exhibition space stages a conversation between earlier and current work from the last seven years of Jones’ practice, mostly on paper or canvas off-cuts. The epic scale of Jones’ work has been dismantled and stripped back to building blocks, the dazzling tesserae that comprises her visual language. Curator Jane Findlay stages these individual moments as such, spacing the pieces like distinct gems and bringing out the organic lines of their uneven surfaces. This allows for curatorial play, such as the thoughtful hanging of a work titled Tender Crags (2022), which sits at hip-level and snakes across the wall like a canyon. 

Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2025. Photo: Eva Herzog.

Jaws hang open and Jones navigates their craggy landscape: two adjacent diptychs render cavernous open-mouths, in which the gullet becomes a setting sun. These new works embrace the quietness of brown linen; soothing pockets of negative space mean the hypnotism of Jones’ pallet is felt more intensely. While earlier works rely on the viewer losing themselves in dense abstraction, a “less is more” approach sharpens her imagery and commands the viewer’s sensory journey. 

Photography courtesy of Jemima Jenkins

The final room of Jones’ Gated Canyons is the loudest: mouths sing with fervid luminosity against the stretched linen. Jones does not let us forget her masterful use of colour, pushing her pallet in a more daring direction with the introduction of neon hues. This addition engenders disarming new feelings as a giant salivating tongue fizzes in technicolour… giddiness.

Emerging from the exhibition space with a case of pareidolia, I find myself back in the atrium of the gallery, its red walls boasting the Picture Gallery’s prestigious collection. Yet, this time, I peer through kaleidoscopic arches and up at the ceiling’s dental vaults and I am right back in the jaws of Jones’ formidable mouths. 

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Jemima Jenkins is an art writer and artist based in Edinburgh.