Rachel Jones

Rachel Jones was born in 1991 in Whitechapel, East London, to a Jamaican mother and a Barbadian father, and grew up in Brentwood, Essex. She studied painting at the Glasgow School of Art, earning a BA Fine Art in 2013, and later completed an MA Fine Art at the Royal Academy Schools in London in 2019. In between, she was an artist in residence at the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art in 2016 and at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, in 2019, the latter resulting in the exhibition Red Shaped Mouths.

Her early solo exhibitions took place in small London project spaces, including Jupiter Woods, before a solo show at 12.26 in Dallas, her first in the United States. In October 2020, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac announced its representation of Jones, and in 2021 she presented her debut solo exhibition with the gallery, SMIIILLLLEEEE. That same year she was included in the group exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery, London.

Museum recognition followed quickly: a solo show, say cheeeeese, at Chisenhale Gallery, London, in 2022; a shorn root at the Long Museum, Shanghai, in 2023; and !!!!!, part of the exhibition UNBOUND: Art, Blackness and the Universe at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, 2025 to 2026. In 2025 she was commissioned to create two site-specific paintings, titled STRUCK, for the entrance and ticket hall of the Courtauld Gallery in London. She also designed the trophy presented at the 2024 BRIT Awards. Her solo exhibition Gated Canyons opened at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, in 2026. She lives and works in London. Her work centers on large-scale abstraction built in oil pastel and oil stick, with a recurring motif of mouths and teeth used to explore identity, race, and the body.

Critics and curators moved quickly to place Jones among the notable painters of her cohort. Her inclusion in the Hayward Gallery's 2021 survey Mixing It Up: Painting Today added to her critical profile, and the pace of subsequent solo presentations at Chisenhale Gallery, the Long Museum in Shanghai, and the Museum of the African Diaspora reflects sustained institutional interest rather than a single breakout moment. Recurring critical focus falls on her treatment of mouths and teeth as a vehicle for exploring Blackness and identity through color and scale rather than figuration, and on the speed with which Tate moved to add her work to its permanent collection.

Jones's clearest auction data point is Spliced Structure (7), which sold for GBP 910,000 (roughly USD 1.18 million) at Bonhams in London on 24 March 2022, far above a pre-sale estimate of GBP 40,000 to 60,000 and described by the house as a new record price for the artist at auction. Artprice records show her work has come to auction ten times as of 2026, and HENI market data cites cumulative auction sales of about USD 3.16 million over the six years to 2026, including USD 1.65 million in the most recent two years, consistent with an artist whose secondary market is still forming rather than established.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Jones, unsurprising for an artist still in her thirties, and works are best traced through Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, her representing gallery since 2020. Her auction history is thin: the Bonhams result for Spliced Structure (7) is the artist's only widely documented major sale, so it should be read as a single strong data point rather than as evidence of a mature price curve. Her institutional support, including Tate's permanent collection and a high-profile 2025 Courtauld Gallery commission, is the stronger signal of long-term relevance, while the limited volume of public sales is the main reason to treat any single market figure with caution.