Caroline Coon features in ‘Fear Gives Wings to Courage’, curated by Tarini Malik

Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings and photographs by Caroline Coon in the gallery viewing room, alongside a selection of Jean Cocteau ceramics. The presentation is part of a Cork Street wide group exhibition, Fear Gives Wings to Courage, curated by Tarini Malik and celebrating a century of Cork Street.

Coon was central to London’s nascent hippy and punk scenes, managing The Clash from 1978 to 1980. Her photographs from this time are widely celebrated and have been used on a variety of media including sleeves for singles such as The Police’s ‘Roxanne’ and The Clash’s ‘White Riot’. They are also an important documentation of activism, depicting protests such as the first Rock Against Racism march in 1978. 

Six photographs are presented in the exhibition, capturing iconic punk bands The Clash, The Slits and the Sex Pistols. In one work, members of The Clash, the Sex Pistols and Steel Pulse are photographed demonstrating outside neo-fascist National Front leader’s headquarters in 1978. A detail of this image has also been made into a double-sided banner, exhibited over Cork Street.

Inspired by feminism and the politics of sexual liberation, Coon’s unique paintings contest binary notions of gender and oppressive patriarchal values. In Self Portrait with Model, Coon depicts herself naked with paintbrush in hand, standing in front of her aroused male model. This work was painted in the same year as Mr Olympia – a large-scale nude in which Coon subverts Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), replacing the naked white woman with a Black man, and the clothed Black servant girl with a naked white woman. Deemed offensively explicit, this work was pulled from an exhibition at Tate Liverpool for the presence of an ‘ithyphallus’.

Women of Ladbroke Grove – Carnival is an ode to female friendship and Notting Hill carnival – London’s “annual bacchanal”, as the artist describes it, while Cunt is a richly symbolic tribute to Pauline Boty and a bold celebration of female sexuality. In See, He is Absolutely Gorgeous!, a male subject dominates the foreground of a paradisial landscape. Coon considers this work as “a manifesto about the reality of female libido.” The paintings and photographs in the exhibition are united by Coon’s unwavering rebellion against the status quo.