Keith Coventry

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.".[19]

Coventry's White Abstracts seem at first glance nothing more than a textured surface. However, on closer inspection images emerge from the whiteness through intricate impasto brushwork. One 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).[23] Others have included Sir Winston Churchill, cucumber sandwiches, Trooping the Colour, equine paintings after Alfred Munnings[24] 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."[25]

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.'".[26]

Coventry's Echoes of Albany[10][12] 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 once resided at Albany (London),[18] an apartment block in Piccadilly that has housed many distinguished artists, amongst them Lord Byron, Bruce Chatwin and the actor Terence Stamp[18] 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".[12]

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 lifes of the 1920s and 30s of bottles, which he painted repeatedly while locked in his studio as outside Benito Mussolini and the fascists came to power. Says Coventry:

All the big events in the world are happening and [Morandi]'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.[26]

The Repressionism[10][12] Series came about after Coventry read a book on the infamous art forger Han van Meegeren at the London Library.[27] 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.[27]

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.[28]

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."[29]

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.[30]

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.[31] 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."[19]

Kebabs, 1997
Supermodels, 1999–2000;[32][33][34]
Key Groups, 2001
Collection Particulière;2007–2008
White Slaves, 2008
Broken Windows, 2008[10][11][12]
The Deontological Pictures, 2012[35]