 eith Coventry is a member of the Young British Artists; a group of UK artists, including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, who exhibited at the Royal Academy’s definitive Sensation exhibition. Coventry is known for paintings and sculptures that intentionally manipulate the legacy of Modernism in order to express the conditions of contemporary urban life. Coventry was born in 1958 in Burnley, England. He studied Fine Art at Brighton Polytechnic and Chelsea School of Art in London, England. His work has been exhibited widely in the UK and Europe and is included in collections worldwide; including that of the British Council, the Tate Modern, the Arts Council of England, the Walker Art Centre and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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Keith Coventry
Supermodel I (Kate Moss)
Courtesy the artist and Paul Stolper
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Art Interview: I understand that you were born in the town of Burnley in Lancashire, England in 1958.
Keith Coventry: That’s right.
Art Interview: What did your parents do for a living?
Keith Coventry: My dad was a maintenance engineer and my mother was a landlord; she owned properties.
Art Interview: What was it like for you growing up?
Keith Coventry: It was a good time. It was a time when comprehensive schools were at their best.
Art Interview: Were you involved with the arts as a child?
Keith Coventry: Not really. I did five A-levels, which prompted me to never want to write essays again. A lot of my friends went to universities to study politics or economics but I just didn’t want to write any more essays, so I enrolled in an art foundation course as a way to avoid that sort of responsibility.
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Keith Coventry
The Racist League
(White Suprematist Painting No.1)
1992
Oil on canvas, wood and glass
22 x 26 inches |
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Art Interview: How did your family react to that decision?
Keith Coventry: They were fine with it. The foundation course is a preparation to go on to do a degree. So you do the course and try things out. Then you can do a degree and the impetus is to go on and do an MA at one of the colleges: the Royal College, Slade or Chelsea. Then when you’ve got that far down the line there’s only one thing to do, which is to carry on.
Art Interview: I understand that your initial studies were at Brighton and then you went on to Chelsea.
Keith Coventry: Yes.
Art Interview: What were the differences between the two schools?
Keith Coventry: The two experiences were very different. It was quite exciting at Brighton because I met a lot of people. But at Chelsea, everyone came to their studios and then went their separate ways. The facilities were fairly isolated. They were in a downbeat annex that was in a dead part of the Sands End, near the end of the Kings Road. Half the people on the course had already done their BAs at Chelsea. Perhaps they were hardened to the isolation, but I was used to a more social atmosphere that wasn’t there.
The idea of Chelsea was to give you 48 weeks of working straight through. It gave you an intermediate experience of what it would be like to have your own studio and try to produce work. I didn’t have a particularly enjoyable time there but I think that it was good for me. It was very similar to working professionally because you just had to get on with it yourself. In real life you only have yourself to rely on.
Art Interview: Did you have professors at Chelsea that were of assistance to you, or did you feel isolated from them as well?
Keith Coventry: They would go down to the Chelsea Art Club for a boozy lunch and then in the afternoon they didn’t much feel like making a trip down to the annex, so I hardly ever saw anyone.
Art Interview: Was there anyone who supported or influenced you during your education?
Keith Coventry: There was no one at Chelsea. At Brighton there was the David Bomberg school of painting, which I like, but I didn’t fit into their group. I suppose there have been influences on me but often there are people that you act against.
Art Interview: How did you begin your career as a professional artist?
Keith Coventry: Like most people I did odd jobs, painting, decorating and gardening. I tried to fit my art in whenever I could and do exhibitions. That was the model; you did your MA, worked for about 10 years building up your work and then tried to get into a good gallery. That changed in 1988 when the students at Goldsmiths College had the Freeze exhibition. That exhibition created a new model, where young artists could go from their BA courses to one of the most successful galleries in London.
Art Interview: How long did you work side jobs?
Keith Coventry: I worked for about 10 years. It was due to Michael Landy, who went to Goldsmiths College and was part of the Freeze exhibition, that I got my opportunity. He was showing at Karsten Schubert Gallery and introduced me to them. I’d had other exhibitions, but that was my first serious commercial exhibition.
Art Interview: How did you meet Landy?
Keith Coventry: I met him through a mutual friend. We were watching cricket from the rooftop of a squatted block. At the time I was running City Racing Gallery, which was in the same block, and my studio doubled as the gallery, so it was easy for me to show him what I was making.
Art Interview: Did you show him work similar to what you are producing today?
Keith Coventry: No, my work was much more figurative and chaotic then. I was allowing images to just happen and then I would build from them using the subconscious and working by association. I didn’t have a clue what the works were about. I just went with things. Today my work tends to be far more structured and my subject matter comes directly out of the previous subject.
Art Interview: Why and how did you make that change?
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Keith Coventry
Crack Girls III
2008
Silkscreen on Somerset 310gsm
59 x 70.8 cm
Courtesy the artist and Paul Stolper Gallery
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Keith Coventry: In 1990 I was producing a lot of strange, surreal figuration. I decided to move away from that and put aside a lot of the crazier ideas. I think that objective reality is a starting point to find issues to think about. But I didn’t actually go about it in such an objective way.
First I produced the estate paintings, then the white paintings, then some work about kebab shops and then about drugs…crack. I also did work about football hooliganism and racism. Football grounds were a recruiting area for the National Front. Basically one thing came out of the other.
When I saw the original council estate maps, I was struck by how much they resembled early 20th century modernist paintings. So, I reproduced a map leaving off all the text. They are a comment on how the utopian vision of housing estates has gone wrong. People live on these estates and feel that they want to escape to somewhere else but they can’t. Instead of being the solution to social problems, they’re actually the cause of many more. This I find to be a legacy of modernism. It’s an existential problem; the social cost of living. It developed into a series of paintings of “you are here” arrows, which I called the ‘Ontological Pictures’.
Often I’ll view social themes through a veil of art history. When I look at something I think, that reminds me of a sculpture by so and so. I use an art historical model to reinterpret what I see and make comments on it.
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Keith Coventry
Junk II
2008
silkscreen on arches, signed and numbered
edition of 50, 70.8 x 59 cm.
Courtesy of Paul Stolper Gallery
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Art Interview: It’s interesting that you don’t shy away from history but rather confront it.
Keith Coventry: I think the social issue re-empowers modernism. If you attach a social issue to a piece of art history, it becomes alive again.
Art Interview: Do you consider yourself an artist who works with contemporary social issues?
Keith Coventry: Yes. My themes are culled straight from the tabloids or based on social observation. About 2001 I started making junk paintings that were a response to the detritus that you see around the High Street, near the McDonald’s. I saw these cups rolling around and noticed that when people stand on them the McDonald’s logo crumples and the cropped composition looks like an abstract modernist painting.
Art Interview: Your work has not only been in major museum exhibitions, the museums have included your art in their collections. How has that affected your career?
Keith Coventry: I did get a free lifetime entrance card to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That’s about it.
Art Interview: What does it do for your ego to have your work among their collections?
Keith Coventry: Not much really. You’re only as good as your next exhibition.
Art Interview: How long did it take until you were a commercial success?
Keith Coventry: Well my first show at Karsten Schubert was a group show put together by Landy, and I sold everything I had in it. It was only about a month after that, that they took me on.
The first things they saw were my estate paintings and they understood the potential in them. But the first show I did at Karsten Schubert was based on images from the Ladybird series of children’s books. I took these images and made sentences from them. Each image was one letter, a frame was a word and a series of frames formed a sentence. The sentence I chose was from Fowler’s Modern English Usage, which says, “In the choice of words, the obvious is better than its obvious avoidance”.
Art Interview: How long did it take before you moved on to producing your white-on-white paintings?
Keith Coventry: That started about 14 months after the first show of my estate paintings.
Art Interview: What prompted you to move in that direction?
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Keith Coventry
White Abstract
(Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips)
1994 |
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Keith Coventry: I wanted something very traditional and modernist at the same time. Then the idea came that there was still scope to work with the ultimate expression of modernism, which is the all-white painting, but to make images within the white monochrome, such as the last debutante to be presented to the Queen.
Art Interview: One of these paintings was then shown in the Sensation exhibitions.
Keith Coventry: Yes, I had an exhibition of the white paintings at the Karsten Schubert Gallery, and Saatchi bought them all for an exhibition called British Art Five.
Art Interview: How did Saatchi learn out about your work?
Keith Coventry: I think that Karsten Schubert was on his regular route of galleries since he shows a lot of good artists.
Art Interview: Was there a major change in your career after Saatchi exhibited your work?
This oral history transcript is the result of a digitally recorded interview with Keith Coventry on December 2, 2008. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany, and London, England and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine.
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