Jones was born in Southampton, England, in 1937 and studied at Hornsey College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. In 1963 he received the Prix des Jeunes Artistes at the Paris Biennale and was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1986. Jones’s work has been exhibited extensively worldwide and he has had major retrospectives at the ICA, London (1978); the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (1979), travelling to the Serpentine Gallery, London and to four venues in Germany; the Barbican, London (1995), which was subsequently toured worldwide by the British Council; and the Royal Academy in London (2014). He lives and works in London.