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. 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; he was also in the Sensation exhibition, 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.
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. The owner of White Cube gallery Jay Joplin, said when interviewed in 1994— We are indeed fortunate that artists collaborate to put on exhibitions off their own bat – Cubitt Street and City Racing are fantastic examples of a process which works very successfully, I've seen some wonderful shows at both these locations.
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."