Keith Coventry is one of the least-heralded of the generation of British artists that came to be known as the ‘YBAs’, despite his work featuring in many of the key exhibitions of the period, including the era-defining Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 1997, which burnished many of the YBA (Young British Artists) artists’ legends.
Coventry’s work has all the hallmarks of the ‘YBAs’: funny, irreverent, obsessed with pop culture and very deliberately – and knowingly - eliding the borders between ‘high’ and ‘low’, in terms of subject-matter. However, where it differs is that Coventry chose to filter contemporary life through the lens of art history – such as in his most famous paintings that recast council hoardings mapping the layouts of grim housing estates into the hermetic visual language of Russian Suprematism.
We see the same tactics at play in his work Supermodel: Kate Moss - 2000, the pop icon of 90s and early 2000s Britain is abstracted into two mysterious golden rings.
It is contemporary art recast in the language of geometric Modernism, albeit with a hint of post-Modernism and Duchamp. It is a sculpture that would be at home in Tate Modern. But equally, in the use of gold, it could also work as a totem from an ancient culture, a goddess of some unknown religion, to be found in a vitrine in the British Museum.
When the ‘supermodel’ works were show at Emily Tsingou’s gallery in 2000, the only clue as to what the viewer was seeing was to be found on a postcard left near the gallery entrance. It featured a photograph of Moss on the cover of Vogue, with two circles drawn over her, revealing the underlying geometry that becomes the extent of the final works.
As the critic Jonathan Jones noted in his review of the exhibition in The Guardian,
‘All [the supermodel works] have been made using a technique…Coventry borrowed from a 1930s book, Cassell’s New Popular Educator, whose cover has a man staring into the sun of knowledge and promises to inform readers about “art and literature”, “languages and history”, and “science and mathematics”. The drawing method Coventry discovered here claimed to reduce visible reality to its geometrical essentials. The inspiration came from Cézanne’s statement that one must look in nature for the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. Coventry has looked for the sphere, the cone and the cylinder in the pages of Vogue.'
One might add to Jones’s review, that these shapes Coventry found in Vogue, very pointedly, turned out to be hollow.
