Keith Coventry

Keith Coventry was born in Burnley in 1958 and lives and works in London. He attended Brighton Polytechnic 1978–81 and Chelsea School of Art London 1981– 82. 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.

Keith Coventry’s 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. In 2010 Coventry was awarded the John Moore’s Painting Prize. 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.”

Keith Coventry is a political artist who is concerned with the contradictions at the core of British Life; Matthew Collings, a British art critic, writer, broadcaster and artist, 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."