From interpreting the ground plans of modernist council estates as Russian suprematist-style compositions to creating gold-plated sculptures of crack pipes, Keith Coventry has forged an impressive career out of confusing high and low art, the classical and the crappy. You don’t go to a Coventry show for the craic, though there’s often a horrible, gnawing humour in his dandified riffs on urban drabness. You go to find yourself caught in a series of challenging gaps: between form and meaning; the aspirations and promises of the modernist era and the actuality of lived lives; the motivation of an artist and the ritzy products he winds up making.
Here, and not for the first time, Coventry takes sections of the McDonald’s ‘golden arches’ logo and interprets them as series of semi-abstract compositions. Referencing the seaside modernism of Ben Nicholson and co, the white-on-white relief versions resemble the kind of tasteful things you might find in a St Ives gallery (if not in Tate St Ives itself). The gold (actual, as opposed to McDonald’s) versions, meanwhile, are taut little essays in oligarchic vulgarity. If there’s a comment on desirability, appetite, mass consumerism and exclusivity being made, it’s one that Coventry has made plenty of times before. And yet, as with a Happy Meal, there’s comfort in knowing exactly what you’re getting. Plus, naggingly, the work is very appealing.
If that sounds like faint praise, there’s an epic work on show here that blows everything apart. Occupying almost an entire wall of the gallery is ‘Destroyed Shop Window’, a fairly terrifying bronze sculpture modelled after a photograph of a bombed-out storefront. Coventry’s work has often made veiled nods towards violence and damage. This jagged lattice is his crowning achievement.