Keith Coventry

Karsten Schubert Gallery, London

Private Collection, New York (acquired from above in 1992)

Through works such as Locton Estate, Keith Coventry depicts the precise ground plans of British council estates in the style of Russian Suprematist and Constructivist paintings. In this significant and resolved series, which was begun in the 1990s, Coventry highlights connections between the layouts and aesthetics of post-war London social housing units, by then in a state of disrepair, and the pictorial innovations of early twentieth-century avant-gardes, especially the work of modern icons Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, whose formal languages profoundly influenced the development of abstract art and, as captured in Coventry’s Estate Paintings, the construction of everyday spaces. Commenting on Coventry’s acclaimed body of work, Orlando Whitfield has written that “[t]hough their exactingly crosshatched and fastidiously composed surfaces seem simple – the jocular subject matter easily grasped – closer examination reveals a solemn and hidden complexity,” inviting not only prolonged study, but also a multiplicity of interpretations. (Keith Coventry: Twentieth Century Estates, London: Modern Collections, 2013, n.p.).