page_title: Keith Coventry
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Keith Coventry / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Keith Coventry, 1938
context_page_description: Keith Coventry is a British artist and curator. In September 2010 his Spectrum Jesus painting won the £25,000 John Moores Painting Prize.
  Keith Coventry was born in Burnley in 1958 and lives and works in London. He attended Brighton Polytechnic 1978–1981 and Chelsea School of Art London 1981–1982. He 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. He was also a co-founder and curator of City Racing, an influential not-for-profit gallery in Kennington, South London from 1988–1998.
  His 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.
context_section_description: His first solo exhibition was at Karsten Schubert gallery in 1992. Charles Saatchi was an early advocate and collector, featuring Coventry in Young British Artists V (1995) at his gallery on Boundary Road, St John's Wood, London; he was also in the  Sensation exhibition, which exposed the Young British Artists (YBAs) to a wider audience when it was staged at the Royal Academy in 1997. In 2006, he received a mid-career retrospective at Glasgow's Tramway (arts centre). Since 2006, he has exhibited in London, Zurich, Berlin, and Seoul.
  Coventry's work features in many public collections, including the Tate gallery, London, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). In 2009, the Arts Council England, with the support of The Art Fund, acquired a large number of works from his 'Crack City Series'.
  He was also 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. The owner of White Cube gallery Jay Joplin, said when interviewed in 1994—
  We are indeed fortunate that artists collaborate to put on exhibitions off their own bat - Cubitt Street and City Racing are fantastic examples of a process which works very successfully, I've seen some wonderful shows at both these locations.
  Coventry lived for many years at Albany (London), an upmarket apartment block on Piccadilly, London, which inspired his Echoes of Albany, a series of work based on Walter Sickert's Echoes paintings .
caption: An example of Coventry's work
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