[6] Before he could support himself through his art he had a number of jobs, including working as a painter and decorator for the infamous property magnate Nicholas Van Hoogstraten and as a caretaker at a girls' public school in London.

[2][3] The owner of White Cube gallery Jay Joplin, said when interviewed in 1994— We are indeed fortunate that artists collaborate to put on exhibitions off their own bat – Cubitt Street and City Racing are fantastic examples of a process which works very successfully, I've seen some wonderful shows at both these locations.

His art conflates the mournful, quotidian sensibility of consumer culture, tribal aggression, prostitution, drugs and bored despair, with both high modernist strategies and geo-political models.

"[21] Andrew Lambirth of The Spectator affirms that: Coventry paints in a number of very distinct styles, and seems to embody the stylistic plurality so typical of our age.

Because instead of being the touted New Jerusalem, homes for heroes, the estates spawned new problems, vandalism, violence, social isolation, drug dealing and addiction, prostitution and racism, recurring themes in Coventry’s work.".

[23] Others have included Sir Winston Churchill, cucumber sandwiches, Trooping the Colour, equine paintings after Alfred Munnings[24] and other icons of old-world Englishness.

"[25] In the 'Junk Series' Coventry takes the flattened and crumpled remnants of McDonald's' packaging, as it would be found on the pavements, and crops them in such a way as to transform them into iconic constructivist compositions, rendered in the brand's ubiquitous livery.

In an interview with Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick in 2008, Coventry said: "I wanted to present them [the Junk Series] as Suprematist-looking objects, using the colours red, yellow and blue.

Coventry once resided at Albany (London),[18] an apartment block in Piccadilly that has housed many distinguished artists, amongst them Lord Byron, Bruce Chatwin and the actor Terence Stamp[18] While the works, rendered in muted pinks, white and reds, appear to depict a bygone world through rose-tinted spectacles, Coventry subverts the image, adding voluptuous prostitutes and ruined drug-addicts while exploring the "crossover between society and the sordid".

[12] The works in the Crack City Series make use of traditional media—oil on canvas, cast bronze sculpture and engraving—and reference the suprematist abstraction of Malevich, but also Giorgio Morandi's still lifes of the 1920s and 30s of bottles, which he painted repeatedly while locked in his studio as outside Benito Mussolini and the fascists came to power.

magazine, Coventry said that what he liked about Van Meegeren's fake Vermeer was its expressionist quality, however ...as I couldn't muster up that kind of spiritual look, I decided against expressionism, to go for an idea that I have called 'repressionism', meaning that, as I worked on each of the canvases, bringing the tones closer together, eventually all the expressiveness of each one would be completely wiped out, leaving little except the texture of the paint.

It's not a natural thing, but yet, I'm neutralising it as an image by making monochromes.Asked why he moved away from his usual monochrome palette, he said he liked the literal idea of Christ as " am the light" and "the display of these paintings in a row is a way of showing that element".

Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy and one of the judges of the John Moores Painting Prize, explains: "Spectrum Jesus explores both the moral and religious aspects of iconography.

Another work shows the epic journey taken by Xenophon and his 10,000 Greek warriors in their campaign against the Persians in 401BC, and compares it to the progress of English football fans marauding through Spain during the 1982 World Cup.