“In a certain sense, he was a founder of Pop,” Gordon VeneKlasen, a partner at the Michael Werner Gallery, said. He was speaking about the British artist Allen Jones, the subject of a survey at the gallery starting on March 31 in New York.
Mr. VeneKlasen said that he was impressed by a 2014 retrospective of Mr. Jones’s work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. “I was fascinated by the fact that he has absolutely no connection to the United States right now,” Mr. VeneKlasen said, seeing it as a “really wonderful opportunity to reintroduce the artist here.”
Billed as the largest and most comprehensive show of Mr. Jones’s work to appear in New York, the exhibition — curated by Norman Rosenthal — features works from 1964 to the present, including sculpture and painting.
The gallery’s London location has a show running through April 23 devoted to a late cycle of paintings that Mr. Jones developed from a 1975 film poster commission.
Mr. Jones showed in New York in the early ’60s, with Richard Feigen, and his brightly colored, cartoonish depictions of city buses became emblematic images of British Pop. But when he moved to London, his work became less of a presence in New York.
London “was bit of a backwater for Pop at that time,” Mr. VeneKlasen said. Nevertheless, he added, Mr. Jones’s work remained “extraordinarily good and consistent through the years.”
