Past the Frame: Abstraction and Its Environs in the Work of Allan Jones, 1968-2018

Past the Frame: Abstraction and Its Environs in the Work of Allan Jones, 1968-2018, honors five decades of ambitious painting, from groundbreaking works of the late 1960s and 1970s defined by the use of a spray gun (rather than a brush) and an imperative to move abstract painting into its ‘real’, environmental surroundings to more recent explorations of the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s. Through a selection of larger paintings (some completed within the last year) and other items (some displayed publically and locally in the past and some never exhibited before), the exhibition traces a practice defined by rigorous experiment, ongoing inquiry, and a granular attentiveness to color, space, scale, and the viewer’s own interpretive presence.

Born and educated in central Texas, Jones spent formative years in California in the 1960s, where in 1965 he was particularly struck by a landmark solo exhibition of Jasper Johns at the Pasadena Art Museum. In the late sixties and seventies Jones turned to a spray gun and large expanses of suspended, at times torqued raw canvas and/or fabric—in some instances attaching paintings directly to the walls and deriving their compositional features from the exhibition site itself.

Known to dedicate, within his titles, works to friends and colleagues, with this exhibition the Hilliard University Art Museum and Jones’s peers return the favor, directing attention back to this artist’s practice in its specificity.

Guest curated by Christopher Bennett, PhD