Keith Coventry studied Fine Art in Brighton from 1978 to 1981 before moving to do his MA at Chelsea School of Art. A painter, sculptor and curator, his fame as an artist began to spread with the first solo exhibition at Karsten Schubert gallery in 1992 and his support from Charles Saatchi, who featured Keith Coventry in Young British Artists V (1995) and the Sensation exhibition, which promoted Young British Artists (YBAs) at the Royal Academy in 1997.

Keith Coventry, Spectrum Jesus

In 2006, he received a mid-career retrospective at Glasgow’s Tramway arts centre and is featured in many public collections including the Tate gallery, London and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Known for a number of series of works, including the ‘Estate Paintings’ (1999), ‘White Abstracts’ (1994), ‘Junk Series’ (2002), ‘Repressionism’ and ‘Spectrum Jesus’ (2009), Keith Coventry’s ‘Spectrum Jesus’ won the £25,000 John Moores Painting Prize in September 2010

Co-founder and curator of City Racing, an influential not-for-profit gallery in Kennington, London, Keith Coventry says of his work, “I look at the history of art, and I look at a social issue and I combine them…I think the social issue re-empowers modernism. If you attach [it] to a piece of art history, it becomes alive again.” Art Interview Online Magazine, 2008.