Coco Capitán
Busy living. Everything with everyone, everywhere, all the time
The MEP presents “Coco Capitan: Busy Living”, the first institutional exhibition in France of the work of one of the most accomplished artists of her generation.
The exhibition
Featuring over 150 works – photographs, paintings and previously unseen texts – and conceived as an immersive journey through the artist’s world, “Busy Living” begins with a space in which several series are presented together and arranged by color. Next, the many series on display provide insight into the scope of Capitán’s prolific body of work.
Reflecting her interest in the representation and perception of the body, her “Fashion Without the Fashion” series is an integral part of the show, offering a fresh and thoughtful perspective on the familiar tropes of fashion imagery. In “Ten hours a day, six days a week” other bodies, those of members of the Spanish Olympic synchronised swimming team after a training session, highlight the intense physical effort made by athletes.
“Highway to disappearance and other death-related anxieties”, featuring lands- capes of the American West photographed in the summer of 2017, focuses on derelict infrastructures acting as metaphors for the cycle of life. The installations, photographs and paintings comprising the series ”Art and commerce after the Big Pop”, focusing in particular on Coca-Cola cans, reveal the artist’s critique of consumer society and reflect a close kinship with the Pop Art movement, which Coco Capitán has rechristened Big Pop.
The series “Middle Point Between My House and China” alludes to the highly personal relationship the artist has had with China, from her childhood (when she believed she could reach the other side of the Earth if she dug a deep enough hole in her garden) to the time she actually visited the country.
But the scope of her work is much broader than this: at just 26 years old, Coco Capitán is already an accomplished artist, one of the most prolific of her generation, combining photography, painting and performance with written material made up of slogans and aphorisms. This show at the MEP is not only the first ever institutional exhibition of her work in France; it is also a major exhibition that provides an extensive overview of her artistic approach.
The artist
Born in Spain in 1992, photographer and artist Coco Capitán works and lives in London.
She majored in fashion photography at University of the Arts London and earned master’s degree in photography at the Royal College of Art. She works across a wide range of genres including photography, painting, mural, text, video and installation with a distinctive sense of candidness and freedom. She has shot campaigns for world-renowned fashion brands and magazines such as Gucci, Dazed, Self-Service, Vogue and Dior… Realising her artistic potential as a Young Art Star chosen by Gucci last year, she undertook a project to embellish the exterior of Gucci buil- dings in New York, Milan, Florence and Miami. She was invited to Art Basel Miami 2017, premiering her short film Learning to Transcend the Physical Barrier that Owning a Body Implies. As a young artist with a great talent and skill, she was awarded FF+WE Prize from the Photographers’ Gallery in 2015 and is a frequent speaker at Universities Cambridge (UK), Aalto (Finland) and University of Arts of London (UK).
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