
Amy Thompson
Global Head Business Development & Director, 20th Century Art
Sold for £32,500 inc. premium
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Provenance
Haunch of Venison, Zurich
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2008
Exhibited
Zurich, Haunch of Venison, Keith Coventry: Anaesthesia as Aesthetic, 2008
Keith Coventry's most celebrated series The Estate Paintings are as evocative of the experience of Britain as anything produced by the Young British Artists in the 1990s.
Much like East Street Estate from 1994 and Heygate Estate from 1995 which are in the permanent collection of Tate Modern in London, the present work uses the art historical tropes of Kazimir Malevich to memorialise council estates and everything that they represent. The subtlety of this juxtaposition is elegantly balanced by the rich traditions referenced in the work, rendering this painting almost an abstract, Twentieth Century Hogarth as opposed to the stark, formal piece one expects on first encounter. The structure of the Estate Paintings evokes Russian Suprematism and also calls to mind the optimism of high Modernism that was at the core of the council housing movement created in the 1960s.
The frame with its Victorian plaque is integral to the composition creating the impression of an object recontextualised and mounted in a museum, almost as a cultural curio. The blocks of colour refer to the utilitarian noticeboards at the gates of these estates showing the layout of the buildings and highlighting the gulf between the utopian ideals and the more prosaic realities of the modern experience of life in a council estate.
Humour and playfulness are always at the heart of Coventry's work but in this series that is tempered by a humanitarian quality and a curiosity in the humbler aspects of contemporary culture that brings huge gravitas to the present work.