Keith Coventry
What at first appears to be a true-to-size plastic model of an asthma inhaler turns into an object with a very different recent history. Life-enhancer for some, the inhaler, once redundant, takes on another life as a travelling pipe for the urban crack addict. For Keith Coventry this is a departure from painting and from his previous large-scale work in bronze into a new, non-traditional material – cast plastic.
Keith Coventry is best known for his paintings of council estates, paintings that are an indictment of the utopian visions of the early twentieth century artist, Malevich. His series of paintings, white squares on a white background, are entitled “Crack City”. Coventry’s concerns with the social ills of urban living, the underbelly of city life, are mirrored in his series of bronze “Crack Pipes”, which addressed the microcosm of city life, honing in on individual lifestyles. His cast plastic “Inhaler” should be seen as part of this body of work.
