Keith Coventry: “It’s only a T-shirt, turn it inside-out if it offends you”

Throughout his 40-year career, Burnley-born artist Keith Coventry has transformed the everyday – fast food, council estates, urban decay, drugs, the British monarchy – into sharp and compelling reflections on modern life. Coventry filters these familiar subjects through the lens of modernist idealism, creating work that bridges 20-century art movements with the grit and contradictions of contemporary culture. For his upcoming Plaster Store takeover, Coventry is repurposing some of his iconic works, such as his Estate Paintings, Crack Series, and Kebab silhouettes, presenting them on wearable editions – underwear, oversized T-shirts, ties and posters – laying bare the dark social realism that exists in parallel to capitalism and commerce.

Ahead of the takeover, Digby Warde-Aldam speaks to the artist about his new series of limited edition clothing.

Digby Warde-Aldam: Hello Keith.

Keith Coventry: Hello.

DWA: So, what are we talking about today?

KC: We’re going to be talking about some merchandise that I’ve produced, which I’ll be showing at the Plaster Store in Soho during Frieze Week in London. I’ve chosen to make T-shirts, Alice bands, underwear and badges. I’ve put imagery on them that you don’t really find in my paintings. It’s more the kind of ephemeral, tangential material that I’ve collected to actually make those paintings over the years. So it’s basically a question of bringing these images out for the first time, and showing them in a different context.

DWA: So for instance, you use text on these T-shirts…

KC: Yeah. One is about drugs, and it comes from a big poster I saw on Rye Lane in Peckham outside an evangelical church. It says: ‘DRUGS. WE CAN HELP. NO WILLPOWER REQUIRED’.

DWA: Wow.

KC: Well I thought there was something quite odd about that! Another is a quote, an extract from Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, a book I had in school. Bagehot named three fundamental characteristics of British society, and these were things that were true at the time. The words are ‘Deference’, ‘Homogeneity’ and ‘Cleavage’, and they defined Britain at the moment he was writing. But if you take the exact opposite of those three words now, I suppose they make a pretty accurate description of Britain today. So I thought to bring those values, in a kind of punk context: some of the T-shirts have a series of zips on them, echoing the costumes of the punk era.

DWA: With the Bagehot quote, there seems to be some alignment with the themes of the so-called ‘culture wars’, and the issue of free speech.

KC: Yes, as I was saying, it carries all the opposite messages to ‘woke’ now. And you know, when I first exhibited as an artist in 1992, it was like a golden age. You could have so much fun in the nineties without being judged or categorised. A lot of the images I’m using are from that time, I’ve dug them out and they’re kind of nostalgic for me. I’ve just gone ahead and re-used them without any care for how people respond to them. It’s only a T-shirt, turn it inside-out if it offends you.

DWA: Before we go any further, I have a serious question. Keith, you’re a proper painter. You’ve painted plans for 1960s estates in the style of Kazimir Malevich, appropriated the McDonald’s logo to the point of total abstraction and produced a contemporary response to Walter Sickert’s ‘Echoes’. Your work carries a profound melancholy, and some might say pessimism, about the afterlife of the so-called post-war settlement and the dissolution of utopian modernist ideals. I can think of few British artists of the past 40 years whose work speaks so eloquently to the condition of our country now. So, isn’t flogging T-shirts bearing pictures of you on crack 25 years ago an instance of you selling yourself short?

KC: I’d never really thought about T-shirts before – I’ve certainly not worn a T-shirt since I was a child of 18. In terms of merchandise, it’s a good thing in that you get to wear it, it’s promotional and you can use ephemera. It doesn’t have the same problems that making a painting creates. It enables a kind of freedom and a lightness of touch. Can’t you just put something out on a T-shirt, without having to worry about whether it fulfills the conditions of a good painting?

DWA: But as you say, you’re not exactly Mr Streetwear yourself, are you? I mean, we’re not going to be seeing you wearing these items?

KC: We are definitely not. And in some ways, I wouldn’t like to see anybody wearing them. I’d much rather they were bought and pinned to the wall. They’re all going to be signed, and there are very few of them, though they’ll be on sale for quite small amounts of money. So it’s quite a limited edition but unlike the paintings I produce, people can have them, look at them. And they fulfill the same function as a painting.

DWA: About some of the pictures themselves: the obvious things are the crack pictures.

KC: Yesss. Well with the image of the three girls smoking, I found someone to help me make it. But then after that, every time I appeared in Soho, they all sort of grouped around me and tried to see what they could get from me. It was quite alarming to go there and then worry about being spotted. I mean, I don’t want to say too much about smoking it, and I only really did it when I lived in Albany, where I had a secure place that removed the rough edges, if you like. So it just seemed like fun. The self-portrait was taken by [artist] Paul Noble, who caught me one morning looking like that. Then there’s the asthmatic inhaler, which was produced as an edition. Now it’s on a T-shirt, ten times larger.

DWA: What about the kebab silhouette?

KC: That went with a series of kebab paintings that were basically inspired by the illuminated signs you get outside kebab shops, and their names: they’ve still got the names of warriors from the Iliad, which have been passed down 3,000 years or more to the kind of detritus of the high street. It was also about what super-snobs these Greek warriors were: when they dismounted from their chariot, they’d ask for the name and ancestry of their opponent, and if that wasn’t worthy of their own, they’d get back on and find someone grander to fight. Anyway, I made a kebab into a sculpture, because it fulfilled two of sculpture’s basic conditions. First, you have the armature of the slabs of meat, like how you mould clay onto a base. The second part is that once a form has been created, you carve it away so that the meat becomes sculptural. You even get to eat it if you want…

DWA: What about the McDonald’s pants? Didn’t you almost end up in a North Korean jail for the paintings you based these on?

KC: Yes, I’d made these paintings abstracting the McDonald’s logo, and the curator James Birch and I were going to exhibit them in this huge space in Pyongyang. Alan Yentob was going to come with us and we’d even got as far as costing the dinner after the opening. All the details were there, but then they redirected their missiles towards South Korea. And despite all the best efforts of some people with connections to parliament, we were denied the right to export the works to North Korea. It was probably a good thing: it would’ve been great in PR terms, but even there, people have access to the internet. If they’d read anything derogatory… we could have been in trouble.

DWA: Why put one of those images on a pair of Y-fronts? Is it something to do with the contours mirroring the Golden Arches?

KC: Y-fronts have basically been cancelled, haven’t they? They’ve been discontinued. Everyone used to wear them, then all of a sudden, boxers, jockeys or whatever came in. I always called those McDonald’s works the Junk Paintings. And it doesn’t take long before a pair of underpants turns into, erm, junk.

DWA: Do you ever eat McDonald’s?

KC: Once a year. In an emergency.

DWA: Kebabs?

KC: Last one I had, I was a 19 year-old child or something.

DWA: Final question. Because so much of your work is concerned with what you earlier called the ‘detritus’ of the street, and you’re essentially working with streetwear here, do I detect some kind of thematic consistency?

KC: Basically, I work with anything that offends my eye. Whereas Raoul Dufy was drawn to beautiful things, I’m the opposite. I like to think I take subjects which are kind of crude, tabloid-y, from local newspapers or whatever, then find a way of sublimating them through art. And I won’t say it myself, but there are things that are [cough] quite attractive in these works.