Caroline Coon Love of Place

Caroline Coon

Caroline Coon

Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Caroline Coon titled: Love of Place

Focusing on her local neighbourhood in West London, the show brings together a selection of the artist’s ‘Urban Landscapes’ made over the past twenty-five years. Scenes of everyday life depicting roadways, social housing and canals, shoppers and pram-pushing mothers, are peppered with subtle allusions to the city’s darker underbelly.

Faithful depictions of Ladbroke Grove’s bustling community and architectural landmarks are juxtaposed with fantastical images of male and female commuters stripped of their clothing. Coon’s distinctive style is characterised by crisp-edged lines, bright colours and hyperrealism redolent of Paul Cadmus and Tamara de Lempicka.

Coon writes:

“This neighbourhood has been my home for nearly sixty years. As I have grown old, the avenue of plane trees on Ladbroke Grove has grown magnificently tall. Even though I think I know each inch of territory – Regent’s Canal, the parks, secret mews and dark alleys –every so often I see something familiar in a new light. The privilege of stability I have enjoyed is in stark contrast to the flux and flow of enterprising people, refugees and migrants who have moved here escaping wars and searching for work. All the world seems to gather here contributing to a street life that zings with different languages and resourceful energy which can lift the human spirit even on the saddest day. Disasters have scarred this place. Homes were demolished to make way for the monstrous Westway motorway. Grenfell Tower tragically burned. But, with each crisis, the richly diverse multi-cultural community pulls together to do the hard work of political repair. Only the COVID-19 plague could stop Carnival! Otherwise, ever since 1966, despite establishment opposition, everyone who can put aside hardship and heartache joins in the parade, the spectacular August bank holiday bacchanalia of food, music and dancing. My enduring love of this place enables me to put LOVE into these urban landscape paintings.”

Carnival: Sunday Morning, August 26th 2000, 2001 Oil on canvas

Inspired by feminism and the politics of sexual liberation, Coon’s wider practice is dedicated to contesting binary notions of gender and oppressive patriarchal values. Her work covers a variety of subjects including sex workers, beachgoers, intersex people, still lives and football players. Coons’ paintings are united in their unwavering rebellion against the status quo.

The show is accompanied by a newly commissioned essay by Jennifer Higgie.

Born in 1945 in London, Caroline Coon studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in the mid-1960s, opting for a medium and subject deemed unfashionable at the time – figurative painting. Coon was a trailblazer of London’s countercultural movement. She has campaigned for women’s rights since the 1960s; co-founded Release in 1967, a legal-advice agency for young people charged with the possession of drugs that continues today; and was central to London’s nascent punk scene, managing The Clash from 1978 to 1980.

In a recent review in The Art Newspaper, Louisa Buck writes: “Only now in her seventies is the importance of Coon’s paintings being acknowledged... It seems that at last the self-styled ‘great offender’ is getting the favourable attention she richly deserves—and now on her own terms.”

In 2018, at the age of 73, Coon had her first ever solo show at The Gallery Liverpool entitled: Caroline Coon: The Great Offender. This was followed by a solo exhibition at TRAMPS in London (2019) curated by Peter Doig and Parinaz Magadassi. Her work recently featured in the group exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery, London (2021) and will also be highlighted in Women in Revolt! at Tate Britain, London in 2023. Two paintings by Coon were recently added to the permanent collection of Tate, London. She lives and works in London.

Love of Place: The Paintings of Caroline Coon

By Jennifer Higgie

In 1996, Caroline Coon painted a picture of a park. The sun blazes whitehot in a cerulean-blue sky. Nine majestic Poplar trees rise like flames, casting spilt-ink shadows on the parched, pale green grass. People lounge about, walk their dogs, play with their children. A few high-rises and the sliver of a Victorian church overlook the scene. It could be just another summer’s day in London but the title reveals its significance: Horniman’s Pleasance — Carnival Morning, August 24th 1996. The park is where the Notting Hill Carnival traditionally starts. Within hours, it will be filled with revellers – something that Coon greets with joy. She writes: “Since 1966, despite establishment opposition, everyone who can put aside hardship and heartache joins in the parade, the spectacular August bank holiday bacchanalia of food, music and dancing.” 1

Horniman’s Pleasance is just one of Coon’s many works that pay homage to the neighbourhood she’s lived in for six decades. Although she struggled with financial insecurity and, for too long, a lack of recognition, Coon has always found solace in her community. “All the world”, she writes, “seems to gather here, contributing to a street life that zings with different languages and resourceful energy which can lift the human spirit even on the saddest day.” When I visit Coon at her home in July 2022, she tells me how she has painted “in private for 40, 50 years” –which she describes as “an advantage” as it meant she could do what she wanted. She lives in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where some of the richest people in the country co-exist with the poorest. The site of both Grenfell Tower (which you can see from Coon’s living room) and Kensington Palace, its council motto is Quam bonum in unum habitare or ‘how good it is to dwell in unity’. Coon believes, however, that notwithstanding the inequalities that are rife in the area, with “each crisis the richly diverse multi-cultural community pulls together to do the hard work of political repair”. She has explored this slippage between appearance and reality again and again. In her ‘Brothel Series’ (1996-ongoing), for example, she pictures furtive men not only in hotel rooms but on ordinary streets, nipping into a doorway or reading a card in a shop window. The artist has long protested the criminalisation of prostitution, believing that it vilifies not the clients but the sex workers, who should be treated with the same respect as teachers or nurses.

In 2001, Coon revisited the Notting Hill Carnival from a particular angle in Carnival: Sunday Morning, August 26th 2000, focussing on an unremarkable street. The crowds are beginning to gather: an animated mother and her child hold a string attached to a red and blue balloon as they head in the same direction as a youthful man with a slight paunch, wearing a pendant and a yellow t-shirt; a woman in a red boob-tube gesticulates to someone out of sight. While a sense of celebration is intimated, storm clouds interrupt the blue sky and a closed shopfront is emblazoned with ‘Employment Agency’. As with much of Coon’s work, her composition pivots on glimpses of precisely rendered, sharp-edged narratives: as people go about their days, larger stories hum just out of sight.

Coon is endlessly fascinated with her vicinity, writing that “even though I think I know each inch of its territory – Grand Union Canal, the parks, secret mews and dark alleys – every so often I see something familiar in a new light.” To create her paintings, the artist spends hours sketching in plein air. She prefers not to work from photographs as “drawing something makes you really observe”2. After squaring up the composition, she underpaints in grisaille and builds up colour with oil paint mixed with turps and linseed oil. The result is a meticulous surface seemingly devoid of brushstrokes – an art of deep looking that results in crystal clear, near psychedelic high-key detail. In Grand Union Canal at Ladbroke Grove: A view from the bridge (2008) – an ordinary scene – a couple are taking a photograph of another couple and their child on a bridge over a canal. Birds fly in loose formations over the winter sky, bare branches shiver in the cold, the water shines like ice and the schematized flesh of the figures is rendered with unearthly detail.

In Kensington Memorial Park, Indian Summer 2011 (2012), Coon’s debt to artists of the past such a Georges Seurat – who made clear that life, in all of its richness, could be witnessed in a park – is evident: in horizontal bands of yellow, green and blue, women gossip, young men strip off in the sunshine, kids kick a ball. Yet, as in the work of myriad artists including the sixteenth century German Mannerist Hans Baldung, the Belgian Surrealist Paul Delvaux and the British Pop artist Pauline Boty – all of whom Coon cites as influences –hyperrealism renders the everyday strange. She pushes this idea to its extremity in Rush Hour: She Strips Them Naked With Her Eyes (2004), the artist’s tribute to Delvaux: a crowd of unclothed people,

1

some with briefcases, most with tall muscly bodies and penises, are frozen as they walk towards us. One holds a copy of the Daily Mirror with the headline ‘Burning in Iraq’. Coon loves bodies and nakedness.

“The nudity of Renaissance painting”, she says, “is so glorious”.

Coon’s view of humanity is one of great accommodation. She tells me how she was making preparatory drawings for Canal – Love (2022) when she realised she was sitting on a condom. It made her laugh: here was human existence exerting itself, in all its messy glory. It was then that she altered the illegible graffiti on the grubby wall of the tunnel: in bold pink, black and grey lettering, she painted ‘LOVE’. Amongst the rubbish, a goose peers at its reflection; somehow, plants bloom in the murky water. Windows of a nearby building are as colourful as a Mondrian. In the distance, a flock of parakeets swoop and soar. Life, as it always does, goes on.

Unless otherwise noted, Caroline Coon’s statement for her 2022 exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery.

2 Author conversation with Caroline Coon, 25 July 2022.

Artwork Captions

p.1

Grand Union Canal, Ladbroke Grove: Outside Sainsbury’s, 2005-2006

Oil on canvas

122 x 153cm (48 1/8 x 60 1/4in)

pp.5–6

Carnival: Sunday Morning, August 26th 2000, 2001

Oil on canvas

152 x 122cm (59 7/8 x 48 1/8in)

pp.8–9

Horniman’s Pleasance — Carnival Morning, August 24th 1996, 1996

Oil on canvas

153 x 122cm (60 1/4 x 48in)

pp.10–11

Canal — Love, 2022

Oil on canvas

122 x 152cm (48 1/8 x 59 7/8in)

pp.12–13

Rush Hour: She Strips Them Naked With Her Eyes, 2004

Oil on canvas

153 x 122cm (60 1/4 x 48in)

pp.14–15

Grand Union Canal, Ladbroke Grove: Outside Sainsbury’s, 2005-2006

Oil on canvas

122 x 153cm (48 1/8 x 60 1/4in)

pp.16–17

Ladbroke Grove and Lancaster Road: Adonis of The Bike, 2007

Oil on canvas

122 x 153cm (48 1/8 x 60 1/4in)

p.18–19

Early Morning, Harrow Road, 2008

Oil on canvas

153 x 122cm (60 1/4 x 48in)

pp.20–21

Grand Union Canal at Ladbroke Grove: A view from the bridge, 2008 Oil on canvas

122 x 153cm (48 1/8 x 60 1/4in)

pp.22–23

Kensington Memorial Park, Indian Summer 2011, 2012

Oil on canvas

122 x 92cm (48 1/8 x 36 1/4in)

pp.24–25

Terrace End and Hedges, 2020

Oil on canvas

122 x 92cm (48 1/8 x 36 1/4in)

pp.29

Canal — Love, 2022

Oil on canvas

122 x 152cm (48 1/8 x 59 7/8in)

Published on the occasion of: Caroline Coon: Love of Place 23 September — 5 November 2022

25--28 Old Burlington Street London W1S 3AN stephenfriedman.com

All artworks © Caroline Coon

Courtesy: Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

Essay: Jennifer Higgie Design: Rory Black

Photography Credits

pp. 1, 5–25, 29: Todd–White Art Photography; pp. 30–37: Mark Blower