Radical Revisionists
In “Snapdragons,” a two-person exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery in New York, Caroline Coon and Francesca DiMattio meet across generations and mediums to reimagine and challenge the visual narratives that shape our understanding of femininity, power, and desire. Spanning four decades of Coon’s figurative paintings and a suite of DiMattio’s latest ceramic sculptures, the exhibition is an exuberant and defiant exploration of gendered representation and artistic rebellion.
Installation: Caroline Coon and Francesca DiMattio, ‘Snapdragons’, Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York (2025). Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photos by Grace Dodds.
For Caroline Coon, disruption has always been a creative force. A pioneering activist, writer, and artist, she has spent her life dismantling restrictive societal structures—whether through advocating for the rights of women and sex workers, documenting London’s punk scene in the 1970s, or turning her critical lens toward art history’s entrenched gender hierarchies. Her paintings rewrite the visual language of the male gaze, asserting a revisionist feminist perspective with a distinctly urban sensibility. In the painting titled Sunday Afternoon - Backgammon Players (1985), Coon turns canonical imagery on its head. Echoing the compositions of Manet’s Olympia and Ingres’ Grande Odalisque, she inverts the power dynamic by positioning an unclothed male figure as the focal point of desire. Elsewhere, in Self-Portrait with Model (1993), she unapologetically claims her role as both subject and artist, standing nude before her lover, her pencil poised in an act of self-assertion. “There is no polite illusion here,” Coon writes, describing the work as a direct confrontation with the art historical exclusion of female agency and sexuality.
Caroline Coon, Cunt, 1999. Oil on canvas, 76 x 61cm (29 7/8 x 24in). Copyright Caroline Coon. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photo by Todd-White Art Photography.
Her 2005 painting Self-Portrait: In My Cock Hat continues this provocation, its title alone a tongue-in-cheek affront to gendered decorum. Here, Coon stands naked against a black backdrop, crowned with a headdress of phallic forms, her name emblazoned across the canvas like a declaration of artistic sovereignty. In Cunt (1999), she takes inspiration from Pauline Boty’s BUM, crafting a theatrical homage to female sexuality and power. Through each of these works, Coon insists on a vision of womanhood that is neither passive nor contained but bold, self-determined, and insistently present.
If Coon dismantles visual narratives with a painter’s brush, Francesca DiMattio wields clay with a similarly subversive intent. Known for her Frankensteinian assemblages of historical and contemporary references, DiMattio mines the past to construct an entirely new language—one where distinctions between high and low, masculine and feminine, craft and fine art dissolve into riotous hybridity.
Her ceramic sculptures recall the grandeur of 18th-century French Sèvres porcelain, Ming Dynasty vases, and Meissen ware, but their surfaces are anything but pristine. Instead, they erupt with collaged motifs, garish embellishments, and unexpected juxtapositions—an opulent chaos that resists easy categorization. In Meissen Tide (2025) and Meissen Pump (2025), the artist grafts mass-market items—a high-top sneaker, a bottle of Tide, a canister of cleaning spray—onto delicate floral vessels. The result is an uncanny collision of the domestic and the decorative, where the mundane is elevated and the refined is undone.
Francesca DiMattio, Teddy Bear Caryatid, 2022-2025. Glaze on porcelain and stoneware, 236.2 x 99.1 x 78.7cm (93 x 39 x 31in). Copyright Francesca DiMattio. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York and Pippy Houldsworth, London. Photo by Karen Pearson.
DiMattio’s Caryatid figures take this interplay further. In Chiquita Caryatid (2025), a monumental porcelain woman rises like Botticelli’s Venus, her form imprinted with barcodes, banana logos, and blue floral decals. Teddy Bear Caryatid (2022–25) is an equally surreal assemblage—part warrior, part ornament—clad in a porcelain-mosaic bikini, balanced atop the softness of a childhood relic. Like Coon, DiMattio reclaims traditionally feminine iconography, yet she does so through a method of excess, pushing fragility into grotesque exuberance.
Together, Coon and DiMattio transform the gallery into a site of radical possibility. Their works reject linear narratives, instead embracing multiplicity, contradiction, and reclamation. Where Coon asserts agency through the subversion of patriarchal compositions, DiMattio revels in their collapse and recombination. Their approaches may differ, but their message is aligned: the rules of representation are meant to be broken, and in their place, new mythologies are waiting to be written.
Installation: Caroline Coon and Francesca DiMattio, ‘Snapdragons’, Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York (2025). Courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photos by Grace Dodds.
In this spirit of defiance, both artists engage in a profound dialogue with art history—not as passive inheritors, but as active disruptors. Coon’s paintings rewrite the canon from within, directly confronting and reconfiguring its entrenched hierarchies, while DiMattio’s sculptures explode its structures entirely, forging new sculptural languages from its ruins. Both approaches resist the notion of historical inevitability, insisting instead on the plasticity of cultural narratives and the agency of contemporary artists to reshape them. Their works, in turn, are not simply reactions but declarations—bold assertions of autonomy in a landscape still contending with its own exclusions and biases.
What emerges from this interplay is a vision of artistic practice as an act of reclamation. Coon and DiMattio challenge the passive consumption of images and objects, urging viewers to question the histories embedded within them. By transforming sites of marginalization into spaces of power, they upend the dynamics of gaze, authorship, and materiality. The result is a body of work that refuses containment—whether within the categories of gender, genre, or tradition—demanding instead a more expansive, more radical mode of seeing.
