Keith Coventry

Keith Coventry is a British artist and curator. In September 2010 his Spectrum Jesus painting won the £25,000 John Moores Painting Prize.

Keith Coventry was born in Burnley in 1958 and lives and works in London. He attended Brighton Polytechnic 1978–1981 and Chelsea School of Art London 1981–1982. He was featured in the seminal exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1997 and in 2006, he received a mid-career retrospective at Glasgow's Tramway (Art Centre). He was also a co-founder and curator of City Racing, an influential not-for-profit gallery in Kennington, South London from 1988 to 1998.

His work has been exhibited widely in the UK 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 City. In 2010 Coventry was awarded the John Moores Painting Prize.

Early life

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

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.

Career His first solo exhibition was at Karsten Schubert gallery in 1992. which exposed the 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 2006, he has exhibited in London, Zurich, Berlin, and Seoul. 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, which inspired his Echoes of Albany, a series of work based on Walter Sickert's Echoes paintings .

Work

Of his work, Coventry said in 2008, "I look at the history of art, and I look at a social issue and I combine them."

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.

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

Andrew Lambirth of The Spectator affirms that: Coventry paints in a number of very distinct styles, and seems to embody the stylistic plurality so typical of our age. He makes what look like minimalist abstracts inspired by the layout of housing estates; he paints white-on-white abstracts which are actually scenes of typical Englishness, such as the royal family at public functions; he makes sculptures of snapped-off saplings or destroyed park benches from inner-city no-go areas; he paints black-on-black abstracts based on flower-arranging or bright Mediterranean scenes by Dufy; and he reinterprets Sickert in a series of figurative paintings called ‘'Echoes of Albany. Coventry’s variousness, which disconcerts some critics, is deeply appealing.

Estate Paintings

Coventry's Estate Paintings 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 maps showing the layout of buildings 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.". Others have included Sir Winston Churchill, cucumber sandwiches, Trooping the Colour, equine paintings after Alfred Munnings and other icons of old-world 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' Coventry takes the flattened and crumpled remnants of McDonald's' 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 Whitechapel Gallery director 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 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 heads (example: right) are executed in a colour spectrum and the frames are the same type used by the German expressionists.

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 he liked the literal idea of Christ as " am the light" and "the display of these paintings in a row is a way of showing that element". He also expressed an interest in the risk to making religious paintings and thought that if he "did it in monochrome I could get away with painting something that's been done many times before and done so well."

Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy and one of the judges of the John Moores Painting Prize, explains: "Spectrum Jesus explores both the moral and religious aspects of iconography. Full of ambiguity and contradictions, the painting of Jesus Christ follows some of the oldest traditions of icon painting, with the image being repeated throughout the series that the work is part of. The fact that the painting is difficult to see is intentional. The reflections on the glass slow the experience down and allow the work to be absorbed by the viewer."

The Spectrum Jesus painting that won the John Moores Painting Prize was acquired by the Walker Art Gallery, home of the Prize, with a grant from Art Fund.

History Paintings The History Paintings are 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, and engage 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.

Another work shows the epic journey taken by Xenophon and his 10,000 Greek warriors in their campaign against the Persians in 401BC, and compares it to the progress of English football fans marauding through Spain during the 1982 World Cup. Similarly, another is "History Painting (One Horatii Fought and Killed Three Curiatii in the 7th Century B.C. / Steve Ashgate an Arsenal fan fought and defeated three West Ham F.C.F. in Mayday 1992), 1994."

Coventry says that "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." Key Groups, 2001 Collection Particulière;2007–2008 White Slaves, 2008 Broken Windows, 2008

Selected bibliography

Keith Coventry: Deontological Pictures. Publisher: Ridinghouse, London, 2012. Keith Coventry: Vanishing Certainties. Publisher: Haunch of Venison, London, 2009. Anaesthesia as Aesthetic. Publisher: Haunch of Venison, London, 2008. Keith Coventry; Paintings. Publisher: Tramway, 2007. Heroes and Racists. Publisher: Fine Art Society, 2008.