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Keith Coventry
Keith Coventry at the Lightbox, Woking, Surrey, 2010.
Nationality	British

Keith Coventry is a British artist and curatorwho rose to prominence in the 1990s.

Early life and career

Coventry studied Fine Art at Brighton Polytechnic - now the University of Brighton - from 1978 to 1981 followed by an MA at Chelsea School of Art, graduating in 1982.

His first solo exhibition was at Karsten Schubert gallery in 1992.Charles Saatchi was an early advocate and collector, featuring Coventry in Young British Artists V (1995) at his gallery on Boundary Road, St John's Wood, London, and in the Sensation exhibition, which exposed the so-called Young British Artists (YBAs) to a wider audience when it was staged at the Royal Academy in 1997. In 2006 he received a mid-career retrospective at Glasgow's Tramway (arts centre).Since then he has exhibited in London , Zurich, Berlin and Seoul.

Coventry's work features in many public collections,including the Tate gallery, London,The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). In 2009, the Arts Council England, with the support of The Art Fund, acquired a large number of works from his 'Crack City Series'.

He was also a co-founder and curator of City Racing, an influential not-for-profit gallery in Kennington which gave artists like Sarah Lucas, Gillian Wearing and Fiona Banner early exposure and was later celebrated in the book, 'City Racing, The Life and Times of an artist Run Gallery'.

Coventry lived for many years at Albany (London),an upmarket apartment block on Piccadilly, London, a period which inspired his 'Echoes of Albany', a series of work based on Walter Sickert's 'Echoes' paintings . Before he could support himself through his art he had a number of jobs, including working as a painter and decorator for the infamous property magnate Nicholas Van Hoogstraten and as a caretaker at a girls' public school in London.

The work

"I look at the history of art, and I look at a social issue and I combine them." Keith Coventry, 2008.

Writer and critic Michael Bracewell writes: "In the art of Keith Coventry, the detritus, aggression and excess of postmodern society is expressed through the poised and elegant language of modernism....There is a poetic detachment in his work, expressed through his favouring of workmanlike, un-aesthetic colours which can often appear random, coldly institutional or light industrial. His art conflates the mournful, quotidian sensibility of consumer culture, tribal aggression, prostitution, drugs and bored despair, with both high modernist strategies and geo-political models. The result is a stilled, mausoleum-like evocation of modern amorality and cultural absurdity."

"I think the social issue re-empowers modernism. If you attach [it] to a piece of art history, it becomes alive again."

'Estate Paintings'

Coventry's 'Estate Paintings' (example: below left)look like homages to Kasimir Malevich's suprematist paintings, however the simple, geometric shapes, typically rendered in black or dark oxblood reds, are in fact replicas of the signs found outside British public housing estates. The art writer Matthew Collings writes: "These paintings capture the moment when modernist Utopian dreams — the well-meant belief that peoples’ lives would be bettered by living in clean, modern, high rise buildings, with lifts, way up above the street with plenty of fresh air—evaporated. Because instead of being the touted New Jerusalem, homes for heroes, the estates spawned new problems, vandalism, violence, social isolation, drug dealing and addiction, prostitution and racism, recurring themes in Coventry’s work.".

'White Abstracts'

Coventry's 'White Abstracts' (example: below right) seem at first glance nothing more than a textured surface. However, on closer inspection images emerge out of the whiteness through intricate impasto brushwork. A famous work from the series depicts the Queen being shown around the Tate gallery by its then director Sir Norman Reid ('Sir Norman Reid Explaining Modern Art to the Queen', 1994). Others have included Sir Winston Churchill, cucumber sandwiches, Trooping the Colour and other icons of 'old worlde' Englishness. Richard Dyer writes that the whiteness of these paintings "...drains these potent signifiers of all but their symbolic content, rendering them as empty vessels...the eviscerated écorché of a once vital part of British nationhood, now rendered obsolete by the advance of socialist democracy, global capitalism and the rise of the nouveau riche technocracy".

'Junk Series'

In the 'Junk Series' (example: below left) Coventry takes the flattened and crumpled remnants of McDonalds' packaging, as it would be found on the pavements, and crops them in such a way as to transform them into iconic constructivist compositions, rendered in the brand's ubiquitous livery. In an interview with Iwona Blazwick in 2008, Coventry said: "I wanted to present them [the Junk Series] as Suprematist-looking objects, using the colours red, yellow and blue. "I like this idea that capitalism can consume anything, that McDonalds can consume suprematism. No matter what you do to react against it, it just welcomes it with open arms and says 'let's make some money from it.'".

'Echoes of Albany'

Coventry's 'Echoes of Albany’ (example, right) explicitly references the British painter Walter Sickert’s ‘Echoes’ series, which were executed in the 1930s and based on Victorian scenes taken from The Illustrated London News. Coventry lived for a few years at [[Albany (London)],] an apartment block in Piccadilly that has housed many distinguished artists, amongst them Lord Byron, Bruce Chatwin and the actor Terrence Stamp While the works, rendered in muted pinks, white and reds, appear to depict a bygone world through rose-tinted spectacles, Coventry subverts the image, adding voluptuous prostitutes and ruined drug-addicts while exploring the "crossover between society and the sordid".

'Crack City Series'

The works in the ‘Crack City’ series make use of traditional media — oil on canvas, cast bronze sculpture and engraving — and reference the suprematist abstraction of Malevich, but also Giorgio Morandi’s still lives of the 1920s and 30s of bottles, which he painted repeatedly while locked in his studio while outside Benito Mussolini and the fascists came to power. Says Coventry: "All the big events in the world are happening and he's not commenting on any of them in any way, he was just focussing on the abstract arrangement of bottles. I thought that was analogous to a crack addict who has no interest in events, he's only interested in where the bottle is, the crack pipe in relation to him."

Spectrum Jesus Paintings and 'Repressionism'

The 'Repressionism'series came about after Coventry read a book on the infamous art forger Han Van Meegeren at the London Library. Van Meegeren had successfully forged and sold on works in the style of Johannes Vermeer, even duping the Nazi Hermann Göring. Coventry then considered how easy it would be to fake a painting himself, choosing the expressionist painter Emil Nolde because he thought his seemingly simple style would be easy to counterfeit. He then took a painting of the head of Christ that Van Meegeren had executed as part of a study for the Dutch artist's take on The Last Supper, a work Vermeer never in fact painted. The Jesus head (example: right) are executed in a colour spectrum and the frames are the same type used by the German expressionists.

Speaking to Simon Grant, editor of Tate Etc. magazine, Coventry said that what he liked about Van Meegeren's fake Vermeer was its expressionist quality, however "...as I couldn't muster up that kind of spiritual look, I decided against expressionism, to go for an idea that I have called 'repressionism', meaning that, as I worked on each of the canvases, bringing the tones closer together, eventually all the expressiveness of each one would be completely wiped out, leaving little except the texture of the paint."

Coventry added: "As a child I was a Roman Catholic. Every Sunday morning at seven o'clock I had to go to church where I had a few minutes to look at the texts that I had to read for the service. The image of Jesus is like a container for all sorts of ideas. Maybe subconsciously I thought of the Turin Shroud as well, how the image is just barely visible - which itself is meant to be a fake. It's not a natural thing, but yet, I'm neutralising it as an image by making monochromes." Asked why he moved away from his usual monochrome palette, he said: "I like the literal idea of Christ as 'I am the light', and the display of these paintings in a row is a way of showing that element. There is also a risk to painting religious imageries which interested me, so I thought if I did it in monochrome I could get away with painting something that's been done many times before and done so well."

'History Paintings'

The 'History Paintings' (example, left), presented in a similar manner to the great historical paintings found in museums, with heavy black frames and hand painted narratives on gold leafed plaques, play with the idea of how bravery can exist on both high and low moral levels. In one diptych, 5th century BC Roman aristocrat Coriolanus single-handedly storms an enemy fortress, while in the accompanying painting a single football hooligan, Harry 'The Mad Dog' Trick, an avid Millwall Football Club supporter, attacks an opposing army of Chelsea fans.' Coventry says: "By juxtaposing the two classes of events in the painting it becomes clear that the power of history is not determined by the quality of the event, but by the power of the narrative. When it's at its most successful history detaches itself from the event and its moral implications and becomes mythology".

(Painting left): 'History Painting (One Horatii Fought and Killed Three Curiatii in the Seventh Century B.C. / Steve Ashgate an Arsenal fan fought and defeated three West Ham F.C.F in Mayday 1992), 1994

Other series:

'Kebabs', 1997; 'Supermodels', 1999-2000;'Key Groups', 2001; 'Collection Particulière'; 'White Slaves', 2008; 'Broken Windows', 2008.

Other selected painting and sculpture:

• 
  1938, (1994-2006)
• Kebab Machine 1, 1997
  Kebab Machine 1, 1997
• Kebabs, Odysseus, Epeius, Tantalus, 1997
  Kebabs, Odysseus, Epeius, Tantalus, 1997
• Looted Shop Front, 1995 Bronze
  Looted Shop Front, 1995 Bronze
• Broken Window, 2007-2008
  Broken Window, 2007-2008
• White Slaves (Ukraine), 2008
  White Slaves (Ukraine), 2008
• Yorkshire Road E14 (Planted 1998, Destroyed 2000), 2009 Bronze
  Yorkshire Road E14 (Planted 1998, Destroyed 2000), 2009 Bronze
• Supermodel 1 (Kate Moss), 1999-2000
  Supermodel 1 (Kate Moss), 1999-2000
• Chateau at Nice, 2004
  Chateau at Nice, 2004
• Collection Particuliere, 2007-08
  Collection Particuliere, 2007-08
• Crack Pipe, 2003 Bronze
  Crack Pipe, 2003 Bronze
• Ontological Picture, c.1999
  Ontological Picture, c.1999

Selected bibliography

• Keith Coventry: Vanishing Certainties. Haunch of Venison, London, 2009. ISBN 978-1-905620-37-1
• Anaesthesia as Aesthetic. Haunch of Venison, London, 2008. ISBN 978-1-905620-23-4
• Keith Coventry; Paintings. Publisher: Tramway, 2007. ISBN 1899551409/978-1899551408
• Heroes and Racists. Published by the Fine Art Society, 2008 ISBN: 978 0 905062 50 1

Selected further reading

• Rosenthal, Norman|Stone, Richard. Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection [Paperback]. Thames & Hudson; New edition edition (6 July 1998) ISBN 0500280428
• Burgess, John|Coventry, Keith|Hale, Matt|Noble, Paul|Owen, Peter. City Racing: The Life and Times of an Artist-Run Gallery [Hardcover]. Black Dog Publishing Ltd; illustrated edition edition (11 Nov 2002) ISBN 1901033473/978-1901033472

Selected interviews

• Artinterview - online magazine
• Interview by Simon Todd for Artnet

External links

• Haunch of Vension