Allen Jones Turns Furniture Into a Stage for Desire

by OVERSTANDARD May 22, 2026

At Sceners Gallery, objects are not behaving themselves. Chairs, cabinets, surfaces, bodies, and fantasies seem to slip out of their assigned roles, refusing the polite old division between art and design.

The exhibition Forms and Temptations, presented with Almine Rech, places Allen Jones in conversation with a rare group of early modern design figures, including Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, Carlo Bugatti, Jean Dunand, Koloman Moser, and Pierre Legrain. On view from April 13 to June 13, 2026, the show explores what happens when the object stops being useful in any simple sense and starts becoming theatrical, erotic, psychological.

Jones, who emerged from the 1960s Pop Art moment, has always understood the body as something unstable: image, commodity, fantasy, surface, trap. His work does not let the viewer stand comfortably outside desire. Instead, it turns looking into part of the mechanism. The figure becomes object-like; the object becomes strangely alive. What should be furniture begins to feel like performance.

That tension gives the exhibition its charge. The early modern designers in the show had already begun pushing furniture away from pure function, giving materials a sculptural presence and emotional force. Ruhlmann, Moser, Dunand, and Legrain are not simply shown as historical references, but as part of a longer story in which design becomes less obedient, more self-aware, more seductive.

Against that backdrop, Jones feels both connected and disruptive. His sculptural language intensifies the conversation, bringing in fetish aesthetics, Pop colour, and the uneasy politics of looking. In his hands, the object is no longer passive. It performs. It provokes. It asks what we want from beautiful things, and what those wants say about us.

What makes Forms and Temptations interesting is not just the collision between eras, but the shared suspicion underneath it: that function was never neutral, and that design has always carried fantasies inside it. A chair is never only a chair. A surface is never only a surface. Under the right light, every object becomes a stage.