John Lydon in a Red Coat (PiL)

SHEILA ROCK (B. 1952)
John Lydon in a Red Coat (PiL)
signed and numbered '4/30' in ink on reverse
black & white digital print
16 × 12 inches (40.6 × 30.5 cm)
this is number 4 from an edition of 30
this work is sold unframed and unmatted

Bundled into an oversized, shaggy red coat with his arms crossed, John Lydon sits for Sheila Rock at his London home in 1979. Behind him, a wall is papered with imagery from his past and present: “God Save the Queen” Union Jack sleeves across the top, a Metal Box poster at upper left, and repeated PiL cover artwork on the right. The sitting falls in the immediate post-Sex Pistols window: the band had dissolved in January 1978, Lydon had formed Public Image Ltd that spring, and Metal Box — PiL's second album and one of the foundational records of post-punk — arrived in November 1979. The red coat against the collaged wall of his own past and present reads as a direct portrait of that transition, framing Lydon between the Sex Pistols iconography that defined his first act and the Public Image Ltd artwork that would define his second. Rock's access to Lydon inside his own home places the portrait at the more intimate end of her broader late-1970s London archive.