12 Facts About Keith Coventry

Keith Coventry was born in Burnley in 1958 and lives and works in London.

Keith Coventry was featured in the seminal exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1997 and in 2006, he received a mid-career retrospective at Glasgow's Tramway.

Keith Coventry was a co-founder and curator of City Racing, an influential not-for-profit gallery in Kennington, South London from 1988 to 1998.

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 City.

In 2010 Coventry was awarded the John Moores Painting Prize.

Keith Coventry was a co-founder and curator of City Racing, an influential not-for-profit gallery in Kennington which gave artists like Sarah Lucas, Gillian Wearing and Fiona Banner early exposure and was later celebrated in the book, City Racing, The Life and Times of an Artist-run Gallery.

Keith Coventry lived for many years at Albany, an upmarket apartment block on Piccadilly, London, which inspired his Echoes of Albany, a series of work based on Walter Sickert's Echoes paintings.

Keith Coventry's art conflates the mournful, quotidian sensibility of consumer culture, tribal aggression, prostitution, drugs and bored despair, with both high modernist strategies and geo-political models.

Keith Coventry once resided at Albany, an apartment block in Piccadilly that has housed many distinguished artists, amongst them Lord Byron, Bruce Chatwin and the actor Terence Stamp While the works, rendered in muted pinks, white and reds, appear to depict a bygone world through rose-tinted spectacles, Keith Coventry subverts the image, adding voluptuous prostitutes and ruined drug-addicts while exploring the "crossover between society and the sordid".

The Repressionism Series came about after Keith Coventry read a book on the infamous art forger Han van Meegeren at the London Library.

Keith Coventry then considered how easy it would be to fake a painting himself, choosing the expressionist painter Emil Nolde because he thought his seemingly simple style would be easy to counterfeit.

Keith Coventry then took a painting of the head of Christ that Van Meegeren had executed as part of a study for the Dutch artist's take on The Last Supper, a work Vermeer never in fact painted.