Keith Coventry’s paintings and sculptures look at high and low forms of British culture from the Monarchy to inner city crack dens, through the lens of modernist idealism, bringing the movements of twentieth-century art and their tendencies into dialogue with contemporary political, cultural, and social issues.
In the ‘Estate Paintings’, Coventry famously used British and American council estate maps from social housing projects with their diagrammatic representations of the buildings as source material which when denuded of the surrounding information, recall the formal aesthetic language of Suprematism. We will show rare estate paintings including two very early American ‘Project’ paintings from 1992.
The ‘History Paintings’, perhaps his most rare series, juxtapose legendary ancient battles with modern day football hooligan confrontations in his trademark mid century aesthetic.
And finally the ‘White Abstracts’ as featured in Sensation (1997) take traditional English news reporting, in this instance photographs of the first black Horse guard and images from Trooping the Colour, rendering them as white Monochrome paintings, seemingly at first glance the epitome of modernism. Again these two paintings are extremely rare and accomplished examples of the artists work.
In 2006, Coventry received a mid-career retrospective at Glasgow's Tramway (Art Centre) and in 2010 was awarded the John Moore's Painting Prize. His work has been exhibited widely in the United Kingdom and Europe and is included in collections worldwide, including the British Council; Tate Modern; Arts Council of England; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. His last solo show in the US was in San Francisco in 1992 in which two of our proposed estate paintings were exhibited. This surprisingly will be his first solo show in New York.
