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Keith Coventry: Heroes & Racists
25 June-17 July
The Fine Art Society is proud to present a show by the British artist Keith Coventry. Called Heroes and Racists, the exhibition comprises three classic Coventry works from the early Nineties, two diptychs from The History Paintings, one of which was last exhibited at the Royal Academy's Sensation show in 1997 and The Racist League which formed part of Coventry's major retrospective at Tramway, Glasgow, in 2006.
The History Paintings, framed in a similar manner to the great historical paintings found in museums, with heavy black frames and hand painted narratives on gold leafed plaques, play with the idea of how bravery can exist on both high and low moral levels. They are presented without judgement.
In one of the two diptychs, 5th century BC Roman aristocrat Coriolanus single-handedly storms an enemy fortress, while in the accompanying painting a single football hooligan, Harry 'The Mad Dog' Trick, an avid Millwall supporter, attacks an opposing army of Chelsea fans.
The second diptych shows the epic journey taken by Xenophon and his 10,000 Greek warriors in their campaign against the Persians in 401BC, and compares it to the progress of English football fans marauding through Spain during the 1982 World Cup.
Says Coventry: "By juxtaposing the two classes of events in the painting it becomes clear that the power of history is not determined by the quality of the event, but by the power of the narrative. At its most successful history detaches itself from the event and its moral implications and becomes mythology."
The Racist League is an installation made up of eleven works. Ten of these are white with small rectangles, each one representing the club colours of a British football team associated with racism in the 1980s. An accompanying work shows the inspiration behind the piece, a cutting from a right wing pamphlet that listed the names of the clubs that Coventry found reproduced in a tabloid newspaper.
These paintings themselves reference Coventry's Estate Paintings of the same era. Like "the estates", they make heavy use of blocks of heavily worked white paint, aping the suprematist style pioneered by Kazimir Malevich. Only in this context, Coventry’s use of white becomes a sinister pun, with suprematism colliding with notions of (white) supermacism.
June 2008
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