Keith Coventry

Coventry's 'Estate Paintings'  look like homages to Kasimir Malevich's suprematist paintings,

however the simple, geometric shapes, typically rendered in black or dark oxblood reds,

are in fact replicas of the maps showing the layout of buildings found outside British

public housing estates. The art writer Matthew Collings writes: "These paintings capture 

the moment when modernist Utopian dreams — the well-meant belief that peoples’ lives

would be bettered by living in clean, modern, high rise buildings, with lifts, way up above

the street with plenty of fresh air—evaporated. Because instead of being the touted New

Jerusalem, homes for heroes, the estates spawned new problems, vandalism, violence,

social isolation, drug dealing and addiction, prostitution and racism, recurring themes in

Coventry’s work."