Caroline Coon (b. 1945, London) is a British artist, writer, photographer and feminist activist whose work brings together post-war figuration, sexual politics and countercultural history.
Trained at Northampton College of Art and Central Saint Martins, her painting employs a precise, heightened figurative language through which bodies, desire and social power are examined with directness and wit. Her paintings resist fixed categories of gender and sexuality, proposing instead a fluid field of identity, autonomy and self-representation.
Coon co-founded Release in 1967, a legal-advice organisation supporting young people facing drug-related charges, and later became closely associated with the punk scene in London as a writer, photographer and, briefly, manager of The Clash. Across subjects including women and men, she/he figures, sex workers, footballers, urban landscapes and flowers, her work insists on feminism as lived politics: a challenge to respectability, patriarchy and the policing of bodies.