//A Prayer For Madonna, The Face, September 1983. Photography: Kate Simon, text: James Truman. This was the superstar’s first substantial UK press appearance, five months ahead of her British live debut//

Of the many talented photographers who provided The Face with its visual verve, Kate Simon was uniquely positioned to chronicle the cutting edge cultural developments in New York in the 1980s.

Simon had spent much of the previous decade in London, photographing musicians and performers from Bob Marley and David Bowie to the Sex Pistols and The Clash (whose debut album features her striking portrait of Strummer, Jones and Simonon). Crucially, Simon’s work also appeared in the New Musical Express during The Face founder Nick Logan’s editorship of the music paper.

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Tags: Bob Marley, Carl Apfelschnitt, Cookie Mueller, Debi Mazar, Halston, James Chance, James Truman, Jellybean Benitez, John Giorno, Kate Simon, Keith Haring, Madonna, Nick Logan, Pierre Clementi, Radio City Music Hall, Riochard Sohl, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sonos, Stephen Sprouse

//World Hotel Room from The Brothel Series, Caroline Coon 1998, Oil on canvas, 122 x 153cm. Photo: Richard Holttum//

“For this solo exhibition to happen in the same year that we celebrate 100 years since some women were legally considered human and therefore entitled to vote is deeply significant for me. The formation of my feminist project always meant that I needed to be a figurative painter – this made me, right from the start as an art student in the late 1960s, a ‘girl’ outlaw in the then Greenbergian-ruled art establishment. I am what Linda Nochlin called, in her 1973 essay, a Realist Criminal.” Caroline Coon, 2018

Liverpool’s The Gallery is staging yet another must-see exhibition: the first solo show by painter, writer, thinker and countercultural figurehead Caroline Coon.

Entitled Caroline Coon: The Great Offender, it is curated by Martin Green and James Lawler, who have selected 29 of Coon’s works and are mounting the show as part of their ‘Perpetual Provocateurs’ 2018 season.

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Tags: Anna McNay, Caroline Coon, David Edward Byrd, James Lawler, Linda Nochlin, Liverpool, Martin Green, Pam Hogg, Peter Ashworth, Roxana Halls, Sadie Lee, Sarah Jane Moon, The Gallery