Artist's Composition, 2021-2022

For nearly forty years, Covert’s practice has largely evolved around his long-standing Monument and Lifetime Drawing series. These works on canvas and paper are composed of carefully rendered rubbings of gravestones in chalk, oil stick or charcoal, with the artist often undertaking cross-country, sometimes decades-long road trips to seek out specific subjects. In 1985, Covert made the first of these works, The Dead Supreme, as a homage to Florence Ballard (1943–76), a founding member of the Motown act The Supremes. He has since created thousands of rubbings, cumulatively forming an idiosyncratic pantheon of public figures, Old Hollywood stars, tycoons, politicians, mystics, musicians, artists, sirens, queer icons and underground performers. Covert’s canvases often trace journeys to multiple graves where he layers of names build towards gestural colour fields that knowingly engage with the history of 20th Century American abstraction alongside Pop Art sensibilities. In this work, Covert has complied a group of key artists including Andy Warhol, Louise Nevelson, Elaine de Kooning, Philip Guston, Ad Reinhardt and Franz Kline.