Keith Coventry creates paintings and sculptures which manipulate legacies of Modernism to address conditions of contemporary urban life. His idiosyncratic and personal project to create a form of contemporary history painting encompasses an immense range of reference. These paintings and sculptures pit art history - Malevich, Mondrian and Warhol - International Modernism, Minimalism and Pop Art - against images of heroism and idealism, dissolute decadence and aberrant behaviour.
Coventry has an enduring interest in the dark flipside of idealism: urban decay, social failure, drug abuse, and alienation. Many of the art historical references that he deploys are defined by the Utopian ideals of Modernism, the aim of which was to refashion the world. Coventry plays with these beliefs and shows them to be misplaced, even misconceived, the gulf between belief and reality stimulating a series of troubling undercurrents in his work.