Coco Capitán

Coco Capitán’s works capture seemingly casual scenes from the world and experiences she inhabits, which reveal the artist’s instinctive sensitivity to the politics of contemporary society and weave together into a narrative that examines the relationship between reality and perception, beauty and subversion.

Capitán’s photographs and paintings adopt an innate understanding of form; atypical color scheme and composition, while her signature-handwritten aphorisms make sincere statements culturally relevant to the times we live in today. Combining intimacy and playfulness with subtle social critique as well as the probing questions concerned with existing values and hierarchies, Capitán uncovers the underlying issue of what it means to produce pictures in a society overly consumed by images. Between the installations that reveal her contemporary interpretation of Pop Art to her imagination-based paintings and text based work that negotiate her emotions in a witty manner, Capitán embodies an acute sensitivity through her photographs being made with an eye for what the camera is able offer, rather than what it is able to shoot. Capitán highlights the quotidian, emphasizing its often-overlooked strangeness and splendor, while actively implicating the viewer as part of her visual dialogue to the experience of connectedness that is embedded in the process of looking. At a time when photography is omnipresent in an ever so crowded visual landscape with an unappeasable thirst for more of it, Capitán offers a reminder of its singularity, consciously compelling us to slow down and really look at what lies in front of us.

Coco Capitán was born in Seville, Spain in 1992. Based between London and Mallorca, she completed her Master of Fine Arts with Honours in the field of Photography at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2016. Her art practice straddles the fine art and commercial art worlds, and includes photography, painting, installation and prose. Recent solo exhibitions include Ookini, Kyotographie, Kyoto, Who Art Thou: Conversations with Myself, Yvon Lambert, Paris, Naïvy: in fifty (definitive) photographs, PARCO Museum Tokyo (2022), Naïvy, Maximillian William, London, (2021), Busy Living, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (2020), and Is It Tomorrow Yet?, Daelim Museum, Seoul (2019). Capitán’s work is featured in collections including Maison Europeene de la Photographie (MEP), Paris and Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam. She has published several books, among them Transsiberian, If You’ve Seen It All Close Your Eyes and Middle Point Between my House and China. In her commercial practice she has worked with clients including Nike, Gucci, Samsung, Cos, Dior and Biotherm and her work has appeared in publications such as the New York Times Magazine, the British Journal of Photography, Dazed, M Le Monde, Document Journal, and Vogue. She has been a guest speaker for Cambridge University, Royal College of Art, Oxford University, Manchester School of Art, London Southbank University and Aalto University, among others.