Allen Jones is one of Britain’s most distinguished artists from the pioneering Pop Movement, with paintings and sculptures in many important international collections, including Tate Gallery and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Museum of 20th-Century Art in Vienna, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
He represented the UK at the Paris Biennale in 1963, where he received the Prix des Jeunes Artistes. In 1978 – 79 there was a painting and sculpture retrospective of his work at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and the Serpentine Gallery, London and in 1995 there was a retrospective exhibition of his complete graphic works at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, which for three years toured the world under the auspices of the British Council.
In 2007-8 solo exhibitions of his work were exhibited simultaneously at Tate Britain and The Royal Academy of Arts. A large restrospective exhibition, “Off the Wall”, exhibiting sculptures, paintings, prints and drawings from the past 55 years of his career, is currently touring through Europe, with further venues planned in South America and Britain through to 2015.
Commissions have included large scale mural projects for Fogal in Basle and Zurich, and two major London restaurants; monumental steel sculptures for London Bridge City, the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London, Taikoo Place in Hong Kong and Glaxo SmithKline world headquarters, London. In 2006 he installed 10 metre high sculpture commissions for the Yuzi Paradise Sculpture parks in both Shanghai and Guilin, China. Two large works have recently been acquired by the city of St Louis, USA and the Barada Foundation in Lisbon.
In 2008 a large-scale, 5-piece sculpture was commissioned and installed at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, and a suspended piece has been installed at the headquarters of Allen & Overy in Spitalfields in a Foster & Partners-designed building. Additionally, he has undertaken many private sculpture commissions in the UK and the USA.
All of the commissioned sculptures are between 5 and 20 metres in size and most are fabricated in painted corten steel.
He has designed for the Royal Ballet and the Ballet Rambert in England, and for West Deutsche Television in Cologne and Thames Television in the UK. He has designed and had published three books, and a further seven monographs have been published about his work.
Allen Jones was elected a Royal Academician in 1986, and was a Trustee of the British Museum from 1990 to 1999. In 2007 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Arts at Southampton Solent University.