Allen Jones Retrospective Celebrates the Universal Language of Art and Sex

Expect an infinite variety of thin, well-endowed, high-heeled women.

April 9, 2016, 3:00pm

Allen Jones, Male Female Diptych (1965). All images courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

Allen Jones has stirred controversy more than once in his career: in the 1960s, his fascination with form in contrast to his peers’ tendency toward abstraction made him stand out, but his use of the female form as furniture and his 1975 movie poster of a whip-wielding dominatrix didn’t help keep his profile low. Now, the British artist has earned a retrospective at the Michael Werner Gallery in New York, running from March 31 until June 4.

Allen Jones, Ovation (2010)

Organized by Sir Norman Rosenthal, the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, and sculptures that span Jones’ early career to the present. Most of the pieces in the show depict full or fragmented versions of the white, thin, well-endowed, high-heeled female form that Jones’ work is so closely associated with. Many of the colorful works have never been seen in New York before, but Jones doesn’t think that they will be received differently on this side of the pond.

Cascade (1999-2000)

“We share the same cultural frame of reference. However…when I was having an exhibition in Tokyo [I] wondered whether people were seeing the same picture I had painted. For example, we read from left to right, a fact embedded in Western consciousness that must inform the way we read pictures. In the East they read vertically,” he tells The Creators Project.

Jones’ work, written in the the universal languages of art and sex, reads loud and clear from Japan, to England, to the United States. See more images from the retrospective below.