Coco Capitán
Coco Capitán’s meteoric rise as a 27-year-old multi-disciplinary artist whose artistic practice has taken form in a number of mediums ranging from photography, film, and installation to painting and handwritten work reveals a comprehensive perspective into the artist’s creative universe.
Born in Spain and currently living in London, Capitán completed her MA (Master of Fine Arts) at the Royal College of Art. Combining intimacy and playfulness with subtle social critique, her inquisitive and conceptual photographs and imagination-based paintings adopt an innate understanding of form, atypical color scheme and composition, while her signature handwritten aphorisms fuse sincere, inquisitive and emotionally honest statements culturally relevant to the times we live in today.
Photography
Acutely intimate and emotive, Capitán’s photographic portraits capture the subtlety of human gestures and spontaneous moments that manifest in her poetic and narrative-driven imagery. Her work demonstrates the artist’s instinctive sensitivity to the politics of contemporary society and weaves together a narrative that examines the relationship between reality and perception, beauty and subversion.
Discerning in her choice of collaborations, Capitán’s photography has graced the pages of editorial publications including British Vogue, T Magazine, Self Service, Dazed & Confused, M Le Monde, Dust, Document Journal, Purple and Vogue. Her assignment work for luxury brands includes Gucci, Dior, Converse, Samsung, Paco Rabanne, Maje, and Maison Margiela.
Coco Capitán is many things to many people: artist on the rise, anointed fashion photographer, Gucci collaborator, and prominent member of the ‘female gaze’ generation— L’Officiel Magazine USA
Something about her work does just click with people. So what is it about Coco’s work that we like so much? Well, her work is funny and joyful, inquisitive and conceptual, full of wry humour and emotional honesty.— i-D Magazine
Film
Alongside her photography, painting and installation works, Coco has directed numerous short films for luxury brands including Dior, A.P.C. and Maje, and premiered a Nowness-sponsored short film at Art Basel Miami.
Her poetic video documenting sister, Candela Capitán, exploring contemporary dance for Dior examines dancing in looks from the Spring-Summer 2019 ready-to-wear collection designed by Maria Grazia Chiuri.
Dior film
Maje campaign
Handwritten Prose
Fusing personal experiences with a spontaneous sense of composition, Capitán’s trademark handwritten prose, poems and aphorisms reflect a culturally pertinent tone, defined by its oscillation between irony and sincerity, naïveté and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism and doubt.
Her first entirely prose-based book, ‘If You’ve Seen It All. Close your Eyes.’ presents extracts from a decade of Capitán’s handwritten notebooks, combining the serious with the mundane as she shares social, metaphorical and sentimental moments with her witty tone and distinctive hand.
What I like about words, is that you are not putting an image in the mind of another person. You are allowing for them to create their own image, based on the words that you are giving them. I paint with words.— Coco Capitán
Catching the eye of creative director Alessandro Michele, Gucci featured a selection of Capitán’s otherworldly musings on a limited-edition collection of apparel and accessories while she was still in art school.
Taking the synergistic collaboration one step further, Capitán’s handwritten prose was celebrated with the unveiling of Gucci’s flagship store façade in Miami’s Design district, as well as text-based murals on Gucci Art Walls in Miami’s Design District, on New York’s Lafayette Street, and in the Corso Garibaldi district of Milan.
Design Collaborations
Reaching millions with her unique brand of youthful insight and wit, Capitán has collaborated with numerous brands across fashion, luxury, and beauty including Gucci, Benetton, Camper, Jill Stuart, and Amorepacific to design release limited-edition capsule collections featuring her photography and exquisite calligraphy on their lines of apparel, accessories and products.
Gucci x Coco Capitán Spring Summer 2017
To reach influential young Koreans with its newest premium credit card offering, Hyundai commissioned Capitán to design a collection of limited-edition sneakers featuring her iconic handwritten prose as an exclusive collaboration available only to select cardmembers.
The partnership drew lines around the block of Seoul’s cultural venue Vinyl & Plastic for a chance to purchase the sneakers, which sold out within hours, and experience the hyper-saturated immersive environment dedicated to Capitán’s artwork.
The collaboration came to life across digital, film, and social media channels alongside an immersive multimedia store experience, setting the precedent for Hyundai’s ‘Green’ card as one of the most progressive brands catering to Korean millennials.
Learn more about this collaboration here.
Immersive Environments
As part of Samsung’s effort to reach young creatives in the US and Asia, Capitán was commissioned by Hypebeast to develop a branded content campaign and 360º activation showcasing the brand’s newest tech products.
Capitán’s collaboration with Samsung reimagined the conventional brand-artist partnership and in-store shopping experience, sourcing inspiration from the artist’s visit to New York and two-week residency in Japan to create a series of aspirational films following her on her exploration of the magnificent cities through an artist’s eyes with Samsung technology in hand.
Taking over Samsung’s flagship Galaxy Harajuku store, an 8-story cutting-edge retail environment in the heart of Tokyo’s most popular shopping neighborhood, Capitán designed an immersive installation that incorporated her customized handwritten prose, art films created with the new Galaxy Note10+, and sound design into a narrative circuit installation combining innovation, inspiration and additive technology.
The fully integrated campaigns came to life across digital, film, and social media channels alongside a cutting-edge immersive multimedia store experience, a series of in-store events featuring Capitán, and limited-edition merchandise, elevating the Samsung product through her masterful storytelling and reaching Hypebeast’s influential millennial audience of 9.4 million.
Short films presented on Galaxy 10 tablets on installation wall
Samsung Galaxy Note10+ x Coco Capitán film campaign
To unveil her capsule collaboration with Camper, Capitán designed an experiential installation at the brand’s flagship store in Milan, launched to coincide with Salone del Mobile.
For her limited edition ‘Lost Sailor’ collection, Capitán explored her innate relationship with the sea and sailors. Connecting her fascination with sailing, naval uniforms, and the Mediterranean, she designed a maritime-inspired shoe with laces resembling sail ropes and a backpack collection made from spinnaker sailcloth.
Exhibitions
Already the subject of two solo museum shows, Capitán’s first institutional exhibition in Paris at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), ‘Busy Living,’ brought together six significant bodies of work expertly curated by the Tate’s Simon Baker.
Photography is at the heart of her practice, but it’s not the only thing that she does; she makes paintings, she makes text pieces, she makes installations, she makes film. To me, she is an exemplar of the way that younger artists have understood what photography can be. She stands for a kind of freedom and confidence.— Simon Baker, Director, MEP
Her exhibit at the Seoul-based Daelim Museum, ‘Is It Tomorrow Yet?’ was curated as an immersive journey into a decade of the artist’s universe and featured over 150 works including photographs, paintings, writings, videos, and installations.
Both exhibitions were visited by a record-breaking number of art fanatics, teens, and photography lovers.
Publications
Ever prolific, Capitán has published several best-selling books: ‘Middle Point Between My House and China,’ and ‘If You’ve Seen It All. Close your Eyes,’ which launched with a book signing at Galeries Lafayette’s Champs-Élysées store in Paris, in addition to museum catalogues, ‘Busy Living’ and ‘Is It Tomorrow Yet?’
