Scott Covert
Artist's Composition, 2021-2022
Price on enquiry
A unique painting by Scott Covert
Edition Size
Unique
Dimensions
106 x 124 cm
Finishing
Oil Wax Pastel and Acrylic on Muslin
About The Artwork
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.
About Scott Covert
Covert’s practice has largely concentrated on compositions created from rubbings of gravestones in oil wax pastel. The artist often undertakes cross-country, sometimes decades-long road trips to seek out specific subjects, which he describes as ‘people of character’. His works chronicle a highly-personal index of well-known figures, from jazz musicians to Old Hollywood stars, civil rights activists, underground performers, and victims of crime. These records of celebrities, luminaries, the infamous and notorious are distinctly engaged with the great mythologies and tragedies of 20th Century America.
Based in New York (b. New Jersey, 1954), Covert was a collaborator with Off-Broadway theatre companies in the late ’70s and was a founding member of Playhouse 57 at the storied Club 57 in the East Village. Throughout this formative period, Covert was immersed in New York’s downtown nightlife and cultural milieu, where his friends and contemporaries included writer and actress Cookie Mueller, as well as poet and artist Rene Ricard, who both encouraged him to develop his artistic practice.
In 2017 his solo exhibition, The Dead Supreme, was on view simultaneously at Situations and Fierman Gallery, both New York, and his work has been exhibited at Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Makeshift Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Finesilver Gallery, San Antonio, TX; The Fun Gallery New York, NY; and in Found Objects, curated by Keith Haring at Club 57 New York, NY. His work featured prominently in Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983 at MoMA, New York (2018), the first major exhibition to fully examine the scene-changing, interdisciplinary life of this seminal downtown New York alternative space.
A major survey exhibition of his work was presented at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale until April 2023. The artist had his first solo exhibition outside of the US at Studio Voltaire in 2023.