Keith Coventry : Copper and Silk

Keith Coventry’s association with the yBa movement of the 1990s is more to do with generation rather than approach to practice. His significance to that generation, and more broadly to the history of contemporary British art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is here presented through the medium of printmaking. His engagement with the traditional mediums of sculpture, and more particularly painting, ideally translates into the medium of screenprinting and etching. From the beginning of his exhibition history he has woven a complex set of connections between the expression of a modernist aesthetic in architecture, its inevitable failure to deliver its promised utopian vision and the concomitant manifestation of that modernism in painting and sculpture of the 1920s to 1960s.