Lifetime Drawings (Valerie Solanas), c.1985–2022

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.Most distinctly, Covert’s works measure distance and duration. His paintings record bi–coastal trips from California to upstate New York, Mississippi and Michigan, as well as time in South America, Europe and Russia. In his Lifetime Drawings, a series of works on paper, Covert has found other methods of marking the passage of time, painstakingly filling his drawings with undulating checked patterns that take upwards of forty hours to complete. They suggest a confluence of references from folk art to psychedelia or even the faintly obsessive qualities of fan cultures. However, the artist’s chosen methodology most closely recalls Victorian traditions of brass and grave rubbings, a popular pastime for cataloguing commemorative plaques. While there is a similar collecting impulse within Covert’s practice, he adheres to a highly personalised taxonomy. This work memorialises a single person, Valerie Solanas. Solanas was an American radical feminist who self-published the influential S.C.U.M. manifesto in 1967 and famously shot Andy Warhol in 1968.