Allen Jones is a British artist best known for his Pop-art aesthetic, sexual imagery, and the controversy that both have precipitated – few artists succeed in provoking quite the same level of debate. A self-professed feminist, Jones’s work contends with popular culture’s representations of women. His paintings, prints and sculptures reflect and expand the discourse around Pop art as to whether the objectification of women in the arts should be construed as a celebration of such objectification, or rather as satire.

Jones has described his fascination with the degree of artificiality and construction of things that look normal to us, whether in the realm of theatre, film, commerce, or even our everyday lives. His work plays with this sense of the unreal, repeatedly returning to female forms which blur the lines between real and robotic, alluring and threatening.

Female Spear presents an abstracted column of female flesh, topped by bulging cleavage which is barely restrained by a pale blue dress and adorned with a string of pearls, recalling an iconic photograph of Marilyn Monroe in this familiar outfit. Undeniably phallic, driving down the length of the canvas, the image is also a visible development of Jones’s earlier prints and sculptures of a snaking, striped tie, a signifier he uses to denote the male figure. The provocative combination of female and male forms prompts questions as to the gendered nature of power and sexuality, and the artificial imagery we associate with both.

A notable element in the picture is the head of the “spear”, a bright yellow, pointed shape at the bottom of the canvas, in a visual echo of the shell from which Venus arises in Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1486). Here however, the demure beauty of Venus depicted by Botticelli is transformed into an aggressive “spear” by the unnatural and excessive appearance of the breasts Jones has used to signify the female form. The shape is also suggestive of a flower, or a woman’s mons pubis, evoking fertility.

The disarticulation of the female form into a stiff, volumetric body is decidedly sexual but virtually devoid of sensuality. As in many of Jones’s works, seemingly overt eroticism is tempered by a sense of the uncanny and uncertain meaning.

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