For an artist with such an imposing palette, Rachel Jones’ Gated Canyons feels near meditative in its staging. Installed across four airy rooms in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, its sparseness feels intentional – each painting given space to breathe. As curator Jane Findlay and Jones herself suggest, it’s about sitting with the work and asking: how does it make you feel in your body and in yourself?
Founded in 1811, the Dulwich Picture Gallery is England’s oldest public art gallery, known for its Old Masters and Tudors portraits. Over the past three years, Jones has been in close conversation with the gallery, developing new paintings in direct response to both the space and its historic collection. Gated Canyons is the result of that collaboration.
Best known for her expressive use of colour and her interest in the complexities of Black identity, emotion and interiority, Jones works across painting, installation, sound and performance. In Gated Canyons, she presents eight newly commissioned large-scale works and six smaller pieces juxtaposed alongside paintings from the past seven years of her career. The earlier works – textural, jagged-edged canvases – are rawer, while the new works feel more deliberate and self-contained.
Colour is the first thing you notice: vivid, riotous, psychedelic. But there’s also a sense of compositional control. The new canvases, though no less emotionally charged, are more restrained in form. Here, Jones introduces bold new hues – deep reds, neons and electric blues – that lend the paintings a raw and manic exuberance. It’s unsurprising, given she draws on references from cartoon absurdism, like Looney Tunes and Road Runner.
Her use of negative space becomes more prominent in these later works, too. Mustard tones interrupt the colour fields, giving the paintings a dynamic rhythm. Jones works in oil stick and oil pastel, allowing for smudging, layering and blurred edges – effects that leave the works open, ambiguous and interpretative.
Her recurring motif – the mouth – features throughout the show, functioning as both a literal and metaphorical threshold. Culturally, the mouth signifies communication and expression, but also defence and vulnerability. While Jones is known for mouths that consume the landscape, in these new works the motif is slightly different: they gape or are crowded with blackened, wonky teeth, evoking both release and containment, beauty and discomfort.
Most of her large canvases reflect this push-pull tension: emotion struggling to find form. Colour patches are often blocked or compartmentalised, suggesting inner landscapes held in check. Some areas feel almost claustrophobic, where dense colour is boxed in by heavy lines or surrounded by stark negative space.
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This isn’t an expansive exhibition and viewers may find themselves moving through the space quickly. But that’s all the more reason to spend time with each work and see how you feel.
Rachel Jones: Gated Canyons will be exhibited at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 19 October 2025.
Curator: Jane Findlay
Tickets: Adult with donation from £20.