Caroline Coon’s flower paintings form a significant strand within her wider interrogation of gender, sexuality and the visual codes through which femininity has been constructed. Far from adopting flowers as a merely decorative motif, Coon uses them as a means of testing the limits of a subject long burdened by cultural expectation. Her own account is revealing. For many years she avoided painting flowers, wary of conforming to what society had deemed an appropriately feminine subject for “ladies”. This resistance was decisively altered in 1973, when she encountered the flower paintings of Gluck.

Gluck’s example offered Coon an alternative genealogy: one in which floral imagery could be exacting, poised and quietly transgressive. Known both for her rigorously composed flower paintings and for her refusal of conventional gender identity, Gluck provided a model of artistic and personal independence. Coon has stressed the importance of Gluck’s “cool precision and restrained poise”, qualities that enabled the flower to escape the sentimentalising conventions attached to femininity.

Coon’s own flower paintings should therefore be understood not as a departure from her feminist practice, but as one of its most concentrated expressions. The square format, indebted to Gluck’s formal discipline, gives these works a controlled pictorial authority. Yet within this order Coon allows the flower to remain sensuous, unstable and suggestive. Her citation of Gluck’s letter to Nesta Obermeyer, in which lilies are read not as feminine but as emphatically phallic, is central to this reorientation. In Coon’s hands, the flower becomes a site of ambiguity: neither passive nor decorative, neither simply female nor male.

These paintings extend Coon’s sustained challenge to patriarchal representation. They reclaim a historically feminised subject and make it intellectually, formally and erotically complex.