Scott Covert
Lifetime Drawing Sylvester James, 2023
£120
Limited edition risograph print, exclusive to House of Voltaire. Signed and numbered by the artist.
Edition Size
50
Dimensions
28.4 x 37. 9 cm
Finishing
Risograph print
The price of the edition increases as it sells out
About The Artwork
For nearly forty years, Covert’s practice has largely evolved around his long-standing Monument and Lifetime Drawing series. His works suggest a confluence of references from folk art to psychedelia, or even the faintly obsessive qualities of fan cultures, while closely recalling Victorian traditions of cataloguing brass and grave rubbings. In his works on paper, Covert carefully fills his drawings with undulating checked patterns, which take upwards of forty hours to complete. Sylvester James Jr., known mononymously as Sylvester, was an American singer-songwriter. Primarily active in the genres of disco, rhythm and blues, and soul, he was known for his flamboyant and androgynous appearance, falsetto singing voice, and hit disco singles in the late 1970s and 1980s.
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.