Keith Coventry: Painting & Sculpture Part 1 – Early Groups, Haunch of Venison, London

Does modern art ever seem much in tune with anything we might loosely describe as a carefree spirit? Thinking back over the 20th century, it seldom seems to have happened. Think of all those isms stretching back and back and back: Constructivism, Suprematism, Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism... How many times have you felt like laughing out loud when in the presence of works by Mark Rothko, Kasimir Malevich, Naum Gabo, Carl Andre and others? Laughter just doesn't seem like a part of their worlds, which is perhaps a bit of a shame.

Now it is evident from the first instalment of this two-part retrospective of works by the British artist Keith Coventry that he has spent a long time thinking about the seriousness and unseriousness of art in the 20th century, and this show is very much about the gentle art of having a bit of fun at the expense of those who have seldom allowed themselves to have much fun at the expense of themselves.

At first glance, Coventry seems to be making art expressly for the kinds of purists who take art seriously all the time, and who like to feel that, at its best, art is seldom besmirched by considerations of the everyday. So as we wander around this show we keep coming upon works that remind us of the mannerisms of other artists.

On the first floor an entire wall seems to be filled with works that resemble rigorous Constructivist pieces of the kind that Malevich was making in about 1915 – large expanses of empty picture space occasionally interrupted by smallish rectangles or trapezoids of pure colour, often set at challenging angles to each other. Not too many of those rectangles, though. Malevich wasn't about colour splurge. His work was all about the closed worlds of geometry and its mystical relationships.

Is this what Coventry is about too? Is he a disciple of some kind? The game is given away by the painting's title. It reads: Congreve Estate, 1997. It's a joke, you see. It makes you think back to aerial maps of council estates, the small representations of apartment blocks that rear up gloomily between balding grassy bits and broken water fountains.

Time and again, Coventry plays the same kind of trick in this show. He reminds us of the mannerisms that we associate with the worlds of certain artists and certain movements, and he drags these mannerisms into the edge of our own world so that some of the painfully exquisite, otherworldly purity of the original gets lost.

There is a clever arrangement of bottle- or beaker-like forms displayed here behind glass. The way in which they have been placed in relation to each other, jostling for our attention on a flat surface, reminds us of Giorgio Morandi, and his endless series of still lives of bottles, which he would paint over and over and over again until he had attained to some essence of bottleness.

Now Morandi's bottles were entirely neutral vessels, and our pursuit of what he meant by arranging them in the way that he did has absolutely nothing to do with what those bottles were used for in the beginning – wine? olive oil? Coventry's Morandi-like arrangement is much more uneasily playful, and more question-begging too.

The containers that he displays in this quasi-Morandi-contemplative style are receptacles habitually used by crack users. They are all painted black, too – we associate Morandi with whiteness. And all that whiteness suggests to us symbolically. Coventry has, at a stroke, thrown a firework into Morandi's party. What is more, he reminds us that the purity and innocence of Morandi may not have been quite so pure as it always seems. He makes us think again about Morandi and his uneasy accommodations with Fascism and its post-war aftermath, for example. He tips a bit of the murk and the muck of the world into something that had seemed unsullied and set apart, subject only to formal, arty-farty considerations.

Art that often seems to be about everything and nothing often has an interesting relationship with something quite particular. And Coventry has pointed this out to us, quite deftly, quite humorously. Cheers.

To 31 January (020-7495 5050)