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NUNHEAD ESTATE

© Keith Coventry. DACS 2023.

NUNHEAD ESTATE 1992

Keith Coventry (1958 – )

Details

Dimension
147 X 85.6 CM
Media
OIL ON CANVAS, WITH WOOD AND GLASS
Accession number
P6080

Summary

Coventry was born in Burnley (1958), Lancashire. He studied at Brighton Polytechnic and Chelsea School of Art, London. He came to public attention in the 1990s with his white on white paintings which were included in the exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy, London in 1998. His paintings often refer to Modernism in order to investigate issues of contemporary social constructs. In a nod to early Suprematist painting in Nunhead Estate, the artist has mapped the layout of a housing estate in South London on a white background. In doing so Coventry highlights the estate’s utopian architectural forms and the work begs the question of how abstraction serves the interests of common humanity, in this case, the housing estate’s inhabitants.

My Yard, British Council 2009

 

Glossary

  • Abstraction

    To abstract means to remove, and in the art sense it means that artist has removed or withheld references to an object, landscape or figure to produce a simplified or schematic work. This method of creating art has led to many critical theories; some theorists considered this the purest form of art: art for art’s sake. Unconcerned as it is with materiality, abstraction is often considered as representing the spiritual.

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.