Terence Coventry - Sculpture Prints Drawings on artnet

Terence Coventry - Sculpture, Prints & Drawings

Kings Place London, United Kingdom Wednesday, May 13, 2009–Sunday, July 12, 2009

Whilst the credit crunch has brought feverish bidding at Contemporary Art auctions to a halt, this exhibition offers the perfect antidote in its whole hearted integrity, quality and simple, unadulterated talent.

The power behind Terence Coventry’s sculpture is not only his strong affinity with the subjects he creates but his refreshingly no nonsense approach to art. Having been initially inspired to sculpt by Keith Leonard, who later became Barbara Hepworth’s assistant, Coventry developed his skills as a talented draftsman and painter and applied to the Royal College of Art’s painting department. Realising soon after he began that sculpture was still his passion he asked to change courses but was turned down despite being one of the most promising students of his intake. Highly frustrated, Coventry stormed out of the college.

Completing his National Service, Coventry settled in Cornwall where he began his second career as a farmer – burying any ideas of becoming an artist and suppressing any urges to indulge his creativity. It was not until Christmas of 1985, twenty-four years later, when his farm was blighted by Dutch Elm disease did Coventry decide to rediscover his talents and carve a pig as a present for his wife, Win.

The astonishing creativity that was unleashed after this piece continues today. Dedicated, passionate and disciplined Coventry’s sculpture exists in spite of any vagaries or trends in the Arts. His is an intensely personal art, practical and unpretentious, honest and imbued with great integrity.

Rungwe Kingdon of Pangolin Editions helped Coventry in those early days of rediscovery and recalls his first visit to his studio: “What we found was this amazing natural sculptor, full of pent-up energy after the long fallow period. You just felt all the things he’d been storing up in himself. It wasn’t just in his work, it was in his gestures: these huge, abused hands, I couldn’t think what he had done with them. But he could draw as well as sculpt and his work was as fine as needlepoint.”

Rooted in a strong figurative tradition, Coventry’s sculpture explores animals familiar to him such as birds, bulls, cows and boars and he eloquently captures both their ruggedness and gentleness, their movement and behaviour. These are not the idealized portraits of champion show animals, nor are they nostalgic images of a non-industrial past, they are a celebration of our inherent relationship between man and beast and this makes them oddly relevant to us – so much so that we instantly recognize and feel connected to them.

John le Carré is a close neighbour and admirer of Coventry’s work. In a recent article for The Times he wrote: “I bought two of his pieces on sight from the Pangolin gallery without knowing anything about him, let alone that he was my neighbour. I had responded to their economy and sense of play. Perhaps I had unconsciously recognized, from my own cliff, the same raucous, swirling forms of bird, beast and cloud. Here was a sculptor who knew his characters from life. He abstracted from them, he refined them, and he made us smile and nod and say ‘That’s right’”.

In each sculpture Coventry masters an amazing balance between anatomy and sculptural form. He distills and refines everyday subjects into powerful and monumental images that have a connection in all of us. Coventry exhibits widely and regularly, with his most recent one man show at The Bishops Palace & Gardens in Wells, Somerset. Many of his sculptures are held in public and private collections both in Britain and the USA.

Gallery information and opening times:
Pangolin London, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG
(020) 7520 1480
[email protected]
www.pangolinlondon.com
Tuesday – Sunday 10am-6pm, Monday by appointment only
Prices range from £250 to £35,000.
A full colour catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Terence Coventry - Sculpture, Prints & Drawings

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