Eliana Willis

Standing in front of a painting by Rachel Jones is akin to letting her take you on a journey around her emotional landscape, with her skillful use of color and composition as your guide.
One of the artist’s focuses is Black interiority, accessed somewhat literally through her frequent inclusion of mouths and teeth. Sometimes these elements are visible and sometimes they are submerged: In works like lick your teeth, so they clutch (2021)—currently featured in the Hayward Gallery’s survey of contemporary painting, “Mixing It Up”—the teeth and mouth morph into hills, rocks, valleys, and mountains. Circles and flowers might represent grills, but they could also be trees and waterfalls, such is the ‘magic eye’ effect of Jones’s work. Unique and seductive, her abstractions manage to convey the infinite psychological landscape that exists within a person’s self.
“I love the idea that you can make artwork from a place of feeling, and that’s enough of a reason to make something, because I think that’s the truth of it,” she explained. “Anything that’s produced, it comes from some sort of desire or a need, and all of those things are emotional and physical reactions in our body.”
Jones appeared in an autumn 2020 group show at Thaddaeus Ropac alongside Alvaro Barrington, Mandy El-Sayegh, and Dona Nelson. Ropac signed her shortly thereafter, and institutional and collector attention followed, resulting in an intense demand for her work over the past two years. Another 30-year-old artist might be overwhelmed by so swift a rise, but the Jones has remained focused on forging a life best suited to making work.
Rachel Jones SMIIILLLLEEEE (2021). Photo Eva Herzog Courtesy Thaddeaus Ropac
Her evolving practice is on view in “SMIIILLLLEEEE,” on view at Ropac’s London gallery through February 5, taking over the majority of the large space. The show is a combination of paintings of all sizes, some on stretched canvas and some hung straight onto the wall, ranging from a few inches to meters in size.
The large-scale works for which Jones is known are present, as are some riffs on her practice to break up the formality of the gallery space. Upstairs, there is an intervention on a wall, with the words “Son Shine” written across either side. One work is a sticker on the floor and others are placed at varying heights, some very low on the wall, drawing viewers in, encouraging them to immerse themselves in the work. You are encouraged to bend down, lean back and step up to the paintings, creating a conversation between the work and the viewer.
“I am very interested in placing my history and my relationship to painting within the work, she said to Artnet News. “It’s really meaningful to have people to interrogate those ideas and to think about them. There have been so many Black intellectual writers and poets who have talked about these things for such a long time, and it’s great to be able to feel as if I’m contributing to that conversation.”
Rachel Jones SMIIILLLLEEEE (2021). Photo Eva Herzog Courtesy Thaddeaus Ropac
Jones graduated from the internationally renowned Glasgow School of Art in 2013 and went on to complete her master’s at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. There she attracted the attention of, among others, Chisenhale director Zoé Whitley, who has tapped Jones for the forthcoming solo show, “Say Cheese,” in March 2022.
“I first saw Rachel working in a different register when she was still a student at the RA schools and was thinking through what a language of her own might be,” Whitley told Artnet News. “It’s been so exciting to see how assured she’s been in finding a visual language that allows her to express so many of the very nuanced themes that she’s interested in. She has this very urgent sense of finding herself within the glare of what it means to be a painter today.”
This evolution is an artist is key for Jones, who starts each new work with the body of painting that came before. “I am really excited to see the way the work develops over the years, because I look at the practice as having longevity,” Jones told Artnet News over Zoom. “And to become clearer over the years, because each body of work relates to one another.”
Rachel Jones SMIIILLLLEEEE (2021). Photo Eva Herzog Courtesy Thaddeaus Ropac
Jones works in oil sticks, and her process both is physical and emotional, tied together with an intuitive sense for composition and balance. “Every painting pretty much involves all of the colors on the spectrum,” Jones explained. “It’s very important that there is a sense of balance and that there are moments where the eye can rest. There have to be periods within the painting where the movement allows you to linger or to pause, so that it’s not constantly like an onslaught.”
Her mark-making, although layered and complex, has a sense of immediacy that makes it highly legible. In some places the strokes are frenetic and in others they are layered and blended, there is sense of experimentation; Jones is getting to know her palette, and seeing the progression is exciting.
“The colors can be forceful, or they can be muted, they can inquire, or they can be seductive, or violent, or harsh,” Jones said. “Using color becomes like a form of communication.” In these moments, Jones is not only communicating with the viewer, but also with herself: “All of those things operating together is something that happens through making the work with a sense of following my nose and listening to my intuition, then waiting for a point to feel like the painting has enough and it holds itself together.”
Rachel Jones SMIIILLLLEEEE (2021). Photo Eva Herzog Courtesy Thaddeaus Ropac
“People are drawn to the way she communicates through color and a visual lexicon that hovers in between the concrete and the enigmatic,” her gallerist, Thaddaeus Ropac, told Artnet News. “There’s an intensity of joy and complexity in her works that instantly captivates and holds you in their thrall long after.” He has placed her paintings in such institutions as the ICA Miami; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Tate; Hepworth Wakefield, the Towner Art Gallery; and the U.K. Arts Council collection—“and this was before she painted the works that are now on view in her current exhibition at our London gallery,” he added.
The waiting list for the works on view is long, according to Diane Abela, a director at advisory Gurr Johns, due to the quality of Jones’s work—but also smart management from Ropac.
“Personally, I just thought, wow, this is something completely different, something that you haven’t seen in the art world,” Abela told Artnet News. She cited the institutional interest in her work, coupled with its affordability—prices are high but are not inflatedfigures around €30,000 have been mentioned.
Jones herself is focused on the long game. A passionate gardener, she also makes music and has “only painted in silence once when my batteries ran out.” She plays CDs and takes herself off the grid while listening to whole albums, enjoying making art to a complete body of work, as opposed to a streaming online. She wants a quiet life, but one centered around art, and she is currently completing a teaching qualification, which she sees as a practice to accompany a life of making. This pared-back approach is what allows her to channel herself so completely into these complicated and consuming works.
“I’m excited to see the narrative develop and the form that that takes visually, how that shifts,” she said, “but I’m also looking forward to being able to work with people in a collaborative manner, because painting is a very solitary practice. I’m really looking forward to having the opportunity to build relationships through making work.”
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Georgia O’Keeffe was surrounded by photography for most of her life, and yet her own efforts in the medium have largely gone unstudied.
But now, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) is debuting “Georgia O’Keeffe, Photographer,” the first exhibition devoted to the pioneering modernist’s photographic work. Nearly 100 pictures make up the show, most black and white and all culled from a recently rediscovered archive.
Though she was a casual camera lover in her early decades, O’Keeffe’s marriage to photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz in 1924 found her immersed in the medium like never before. She posed in hundreds of Stieglitz’s portraits, helped make and mount his prints, and even assisted in the design of his shows.
But it wasn’t until the mid-1940s, after the death of her husband, that O’Keeffe began seriously making photographs of her own. Studying with photographer Todd Webb, she found herself turning a lens toward her surroundings in northern New Mexico—often capturing chemically the same subjects she painted years before.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Forbidding Canyon, Glen Canyon (September 1964). © Georgia O’KeeffeMuseum.
It’s not hard to tell that O’Keeffe was the eye behind the images—and not just because the majority of them feature the same beloved New Mexican landscapes and flora that populate her paintings. Her signature sense of composition is there, too. You can recognize it in the way she photographs the bodily curves of riverbeds and adobe homes, or in her fascination with the long, graphic shadows that dramatize the desert every morning and afternoon. Her ability to capture nature’s feminine grace remains unparalleled.
After the show’s run in Texas, it will head to the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. There, when the exhibition opens in February of next year, it will do so alongside two other presentations meant to contextualize O’Keeffe’s photographs: “Arthur Wesley Dow: Nearest to the Divine,” which brings together the work of O’Keeffe’s influential mentor in New York; and “’What Next?’: Camera Work and 291 Magazine,” a collection of images from two seminal photography journals compiled to offer a snapshot of the artistic scene surrounding her and Stieglitz.
See more examples of O’Keeffe’s photography below.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Big Sage (Artemisia tridentata) (1957). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Ladder against Wall (1961). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Waiʻanapanapa Black Sand Beach (March 1939). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Road from Abiquiú (1959–66). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Garage Vigas and Studio Door (July 1956). © 2022 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Chama River (1957–63). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Ladder against Studio Wall in Snow (1959–60). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
Georgia O’Keeffe, Skull, Ghost Ranch (1961–72). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
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What does it mean to be an “American artist”? There are museums, galleries, and whole programs of study dedicated to the genre, but as with everything that seems black and white at first, it’s not so simple.
For the artist Raúl de Nieves, born in Michoacán, Mexico, the question of what it means to be American came to the fore of his mind in 2017, when he was preparing a major installation for that year’s Whitney Biennial. “Essentially, I’m showing in ‘the museum of American art’ and I’m from Mexican descent, but, you know, what does that mean today?” he asked in a 2017 interview with Art21. 
De Nieves came to the U.S. at nine years old with no warning and no suitcase. Today, his artwork—which encompasses densely adorned sculpture, installation, and performance—melds the two worlds in which he was raised. Many of his materials, colors, and forms fuse the aesthetics of traditional Mexican craft, queer club culture, and religious iconography.
Sculptures and stained-glass window by Raúl de Nieves. Photo: Henri Neuendorf.
For the Whitney Biennial, de Nieves created a room-engulfing stained-glass mural that traces an individual’s evolution from struggle and self-doubt to celebration. “The mural talks about this experience—this journey,” the artist said. “I feel really happy that I could put so much emphasis on this idea of ‘a better tomorrow’ in my artwork.”
De Nieves’s latest exhibition, on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (through June 24, 2022), is in many ways an extension of the themes he explored in the Whitney Biennial project. “The Treasure House of Memory” includes a collage of tarot-inspired drawings, a painting of the legend of Saint George and the Dragon, and a series of beaded sculptures that trace the evolution of a human figure into a horse.
“Growing up in Mexico was really magical because I got to see a lot of forms of celebration,” the artist, whose father died at the young age of 33, told Art21. “I got to experience death as a really young child. That’s what my work is about: it’s like seeing the facets of happiness and sadness all in one place.”
This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org. More

A forthcoming film starring Benedict Cumberbatch, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, is reviving the reputation of a popular illustrator known for depictions of cats that captivated Victorian England—and the psychiatric hospital in southeast England where he spent his later days has mounted an exhibition of his work to coincide with the film’s release.
The eccentric artist’s feline fascinations are on view in “Animal Therapy: The Cats of Louis Wain” at Bethlem Museum of the Mind, which is housed within Bethlem Royal Hospital, the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, in southeast England. The institution was a pioneer in recognizing the potential of animal therapy for its patients’ well-being.
Wain’s drawings were immensely popular a century ago, appearing in newspapers and children’s books as well as on greeting cards. When his mental health declined in old age, he was admitted to Springfield Hospital; so loyal was his following that when the public learned about his situation, he was moved to the “more salubrious” surroundings of Bethlem (as the hospital describes them), where he continued to draw and paint. The exhibition draws works from the museum’s holdings, as well as loans from a private collector.
“Animals have always been known for their affinity to man,” said Kate McCormack, the hospital’s senior dramatherapist, in the press release (which, uncharacteristic of announcements of museum shows, pronounces it “a gleeful new exhibition”). “At the Bethlem Royal Hospital, the Pets as Therapy program has helped forge relationships between service-users and dogs, notably a Siberian husky named Tess. From offering unconditional affection to aiding in confronting fears and phobias, pets can be a big part of a person’s recovery and journey to improved mental health. Animals can offer a very pure and unconditional relationship without demands or expectations.”

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The film treatment of the artist’s life, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, directed by Will Sharpe, co-starring Claire Foy as Wain’s wife, Emily Richardson, and with voiceover by Olivia Colman, opens on New Year’s Day. The New York Times dubs the film “the cat’s meow,” describing Cumberbatch as “irresistible” and the script as “garrulous [and] lightly funny,” concluding that the film draws “a deeply human self-portrait.”
See Wain’s work and a film still here.
Louis Wain, Cats’ Christmas (ca. 1935). Courtesy Bethlem Museum of the Mind.
Louis Wain, Carol Singing Cats (ca. 1930). Courtesy Bethlem Museum of the Mind.
Louis Wain, I Am Happy Because Everybody Loves Me (ca. 1928). Courtesy Bethlem Museum of the Mind.
Louis Wain, Sweetness Coyed Love Into its Smile (ca. 1935). Courtesy Bethlem Museum of the Mind.
Louis Wain, Kaleidoscope Cats VI (undated). Courtesy Bethlem Museum of the Mind.
Still from The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy. Courtesy Studio Canal.
“Animal Therapy: The Cats of Louis Wain” is on view at Bethlem Museum of the Mind through April 13, 2022.
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