Viewing Allen Jones: Taking Shape

Shape-shifting.

He has spent six decades making the body strange, beautiful and perpetually unresolved. Allen Jones, British Pop Art’s great provocateur, arrives at Camden Arts Projects with Taking Shape, a survey that moves across painting and sculpture to ask a question as relevant now as it was in 1963: what does a figure do to the person looking at it?

Curated by Philip Colbert, the exhibition gathers works spanning Jones’s career alongside Aerial (2026), a monumental new commission created especially for the gallery. Suspended more than five metres above the main space, the aluminium sculpture hovers between the building’s two levels with an implausible, almost digital weightlessness – the kind of object that makes you question what you thought you understood about mass and material.

Outside, Sumo II (2006) stands guard in weathered Corten steel, its planes slowly yielding the form of a wrestler coiled for movement. Inside, Red Queen (2014) and Blue Queen (2015) pair painted timber bodies with transparent Perspex profiles whose silhouettes shift as you move, casting lines and shadows that continuously redraw themselves. Belle of Shoreditch (2020) teeters between image and object; Large Swivel (2024) invites visitors to physically reposition a figure’s leg, making every viewer a collaborator. The oil-and-montage triptych Tirez (2005), meanwhile, pulls this restless energy back onto canvas, a figure fracturing through planes like a body caught between frames. Jones has always maintained that he is, first and last, a painter.

The cultural timing could not be sharper. At this year’s Met Gala, Kim Kardashian wore a tangerine fibreglass breastplate made by Jones himself: a reworking of his Body Armour piece, originally conceived in the late 1960s for a film that was never produced, paired with a leather half-skirt hand-painted by the artist. The result merged Jones’s sculptural and painted language with the leatherwork of Whitaker Malem, creating something that sat genuinely between fashion and art object. When the most watched woman in the world commissions a 91-year-old British Pop artist to make her a sculpture to wear to the Met, the conversation Jones started about bodies, perception and the gaze is clearly far from over.

Essential viewing, and for those of us at The Wick who have always believed that art and fashion are simply different names for the same obsession, a particularly satisfying one.

Taking Shape is at Camden Arts Projects now.