Grayson Perry

"This piece is also based on an early English press moulded slipware plate. A lot of these would have been produced around the time of the English civil war and often depicted King Charles, sometimes up an oak tree, sometimes on horseback. The civil war raging in the USA at the moment is of course the culture war. On this plate we have Donald Trump on horseback, his hat balanced on his impossible hair surrounded by tweeting birds. The art world has a strong left wing bias and artists often make work attacking the right from a patronising highly educated standpoint. Rather than change anyone’s mind this often has the opposite effect as the US is such an individualistic society that people will do the opposite of what lefty do-gooders say just because they refuse to be told what to do by an educated elite. The anger around wearing face masks in the US is a good example of this." Grayson Perry (2020)

Very Large Very Expensive Abstract Painting, 2020, enfolds a map of Manhattan and a Jackson Pollock style abstraction within its imagery. Writing about the work, Perry notes, ‘If I think of American cultural power, the image that pops into my head is a huge Abstract Expressionist painting, a Cold War symbol of a self-confident land of the free. This tapestry is made up of layers that reflect some of the cultural and social archaeology of Manhattan.’

Decorated with images of beaming individuals, blissfully happy at work or at sun-kissed leisure, Searching for Authenticity broaches the slippery concepts of meaning and significance, life and lifestyle – what can be authentically experienced or simply acquired. Writing about the work, Perry comments, ‘the narcissistic Instagram culture is a main theme. I often think that when people go on holiday they want to appear in the photographs they have seen in the brochure… Searching for Authenticity comes from my fascination with the rapidly crystallising clichés of the so-called “experience economy”. The global conformity of those who refuse to be labelled.’

Earlier works include two tapestries made for A House for Essex, designed by Perry in collaboration with FAT Architecture in 2015 to evoke a wayside pilgrimage chapel which, instead of a patron saint, is dedicated to the life of a fictional character, Julie Cope. Completed in the style of Renaissance religious paintings, with the main characters shown several times in vignettes within each image, the tapestries illustrate key moments in Cope’s life. Writing about A Perfect Match, Perry says, ‘The title of this one is a quote from the long poem I wrote, “The Ballad of Julie Cope”: Friends all agreed they were “a perfect match”. Julie had met Dave, her first husband, as a teenager when he was guitarist in a band called The Riders of Rohan that played the pubs on the Essex Marshes. He worked in the Coryton Refinery and was an aspirational young man; he soon became a foreman… By the 1970s, Julie and Dave had moved to South Woodham Ferrers, a big new development that I lived very close to when I was growing up. But all is not rosy – at the bottom left you can see the pink hairbrush of Pam, the “other woman”, and the bunch of flowers in Julie’s hand with a message from Dave that reads: “I am so sorry x D”.’

Perry’s inspiration for Mr Chonky Chonk, 2021, was ‘looking at the person in front when you’re in the supermarket. You’re making a character assessment from their basket. I found this pre-Columbian, Peruvian ceramic pot. He’s a chunky kind of guy. A good starting point for a pot about food. I fired on transfers from photos of things in my kitchen. My auntie could spread the perfect Marmite toast. That was a big part of my childhood.’

Credit Card, A13, Van Eyck, Microprocessor is a new tapestry created, Perry explains, because ‘I wanted to make something from the stuff of normal life, money, commuting, marriage, the internet. I layered the four images one on top of the other and then rubbed through them digitally until I could just about make out all four. It looks like a small worn carpet, a prayer mat, the first thing my feet might touch in the morning, grateful to be alive, another normal day.’

A new work, the large-scale etching Our Town, 2022, is a map inspired by Perry’s experience of social media during lockdown, a place that to the artist seems ‘quaint… but beneath the surface it is seething with snobbery, grievance and disappointment. Wherever you go you could trip over a modern cliché or an annoying neologism. Words are boxes and triggers and slurs. It is best to be a wry flâneur in Our Town.’

For Morris, Gainsborough, Turner, Riley, 2021, Perry combined imagery drawn from the history of British art, featuring work by William Morris, Thomas Gainsborough, JMW Turner and Bridget Riley. These works are not referenced outright; rather, they are digitally altered or adjusted, their colours and orientation changed within the tapestry’s rich and layered textures.

Works on paper on view in Venice feature urban foxes. Perry writes, ‘I can remember the first time I saw an urban fox. I was so thrilled to see this piece of wildness wandering across the road nonchalantly. I like to go out on my bicycle around the town at night. They pop up all the time and their eyes glow in my lights. I have drawn, collaged and painted my encounters with Mr Fox.’

‘People are very wedded to the idea of a neat ending: our rational brains would love us to tidy up the mess of the world and to have either Armageddon or Heaven at the end of our existence. But life doesn’t work like that – it’s a continuum.’— Grayson Perry. Grayson Perry is a great chronicler of contemporary life, drawing us in with wit, affecting sentiment and nostalgia as well as, at times, fear and anger. In his work, Perry tackles subjects that are universally human: identity, gender, social status, sexuality, religion. Writing about Map of Nowhere around the time of its making, the artist commented, ‘The starting point of this print was Thomas More’s Utopia. Utopia is a pun on the Greek ou topos meaning ‘no place’. I was playing with the idea of there being no Heaven. People are very wedded to the idea of a neat ending: our rational brains would love us to tidy up the mess of the world and to have either Armageddon or Heaven at the end of our existence. But life doesn’t work like that – it’s a continuum… The basic formal design came from a German mappa mundi called the Ebstorf Map, which was destroyed in the Second World War. It showed Jesus as the body of the world. My daughter often accuses me of setting myself up as God, so I made the lakes and rivers into my body. The whole idea of alchemy and a spiritual body fascinates me. I wrote place names on the map with references to modern-day things like ‘Internet dating’ and ‘Binge-drinking’. There are lots of jokey references to ecology and green politics. In the middle of the map is ‘Doubt’, because a philosopher once said: ‘Doubt is the essence of civilisation.’ The image of a skeletal child is like an early anatomical drawing but here the child is covered in bigotries: he has ‘Racism’ on one hand and ‘Sexism’ on the other. ‘Fear’ is in his guts, because all bigotry starts with fear. A light shines out of my bottom hole, down onto a monastic building on the mountainside. The landscape around it shows a pilgrimage scene with people in religious garb carrying funny dolls and backpacks. The map is very flat but the drawing at the bottom has a 3-D quality: it’s like the difference between the realms of the spiritual and the human, or the split between mind and body.’

Works on paper on view in Venice feature urban foxes. Perry writes, ‘I can remember the first time I saw an urban fox. I was so thrilled to see this piece of wildness wandering across the road nonchalantly. I like to go out on my bicycle around the town at night. They pop up all the time and their eyes glow in my lights. I have drawn, collaged and painted my encounters with Mr Fox.’

The Digmoor Tapestry was inspired by conversations held during the filming of Perry’s 2016 Channel 4 series All Man. Perry writes, ‘This work is my reaction after talking to a group of young men from Skelmersdale, Lancashire. They are the victims of poverty, chaotic parenting, bad role models and disrupted education. They hung around street corners selling weed, riding motorbikes around parks and getting into fights with rival groups. They were at an age when a hormonal need to assert their masculinity was at its freshest. Deprived of acceptable badges of status, job, money, education, power and family, they exercised their masculinity in a way that seemed to echo back to the dawn of humanity – they defended territory. That territory was the Digmoor estate, a quadrant of a 1970s new town bounded by dual carriageways. They seemed prepared to kill for it. The Digmoor Tapestry is a map of the state the defended. The style was inspired by traditional African fabrics and the graffiti is taken directly from the boys’ environment. On seeing it one of them commented, “It looks like it’s been used to wrap up a body”.’

New works include Sacred Tribal Artefact, 2023. Perry explains, ‘My starting points for this tapestry were Persian Lion rugs, a tradition that goes back to the twelfth century, and American folk art, in the form of hooked rugs, which often depict a domestic cat. The Lion is a symbol of power, particularly male power in many cultures, even in countries where lions are not a native species, like England. I have drawn a rather tired, battered, ageing, defeated old patriarch who is handing over the sword and the tattered flag of England to a young woman. His coat is matted and is marked by traditional motifs from different lands. His fart is in the shape of a nuclear explosion. This work is a heraldic depiction of an ancient country in a time of change.’

"This work is again based on an early English press moulded plate showing two gents smoking and drinking in a coffee house. Crybully and Lolcow perhaps sound like characters in a restoration comedy but they are two very modern terms I gleaned from a rather brilliant YouTube channel called ContraPoints. Crybully is an elegant way of putting the psychotherapeutic phenomenon of ‘persecuting from a victim standpoint’ someone who thinks because they have had something unfortunate happen to them it gives them a free pass to be awful to other people. A Lolcow is someone on social media who is unwittingly hilarious and other users will provoke and tease the Lolcow into reacting in an unconsciously stupid, angry and unintentionally funny way, they milk them for laughs hence Lolcow." Grayson Perry (2020)

"Most of us want to be good people, or at least we want to appear to be good to our social media followers. We want others to see we are ‘doing the right thing’, supporting the right causes, using the right words. Performative goodness clogs our timelines. We don’t want our selfishness, our cynicism our uncaring side to show online. This vase is covered with the lexicon of the politically correct, the approved vocabulary as set out by the thousand and ten commandments of the online moral code, ‘The good old days’ (bad), ’tone policing’, ‘cisnormativity’, ‘other ways of knowing’, ‘straight passing’, ‘non consensual puberty’, ’white fragility’. On top of this are faded photographic images, the apple pie and Instagram clichés of America. On top of everything are white floral motifs containing six fundamental goods, Love, Peace, Freedom, Equality, Respect and Justice. It is all just decoration." Grayson Perry (2020)

Earlier works include two tapestries made for A House for Essex, designed by Perry in collaboration with FAT Architecture in 2015 to evoke a wayside pilgrimage chapel which, instead of a patron saint, is dedicated to the life of a fictional character, Julie Cope. Completed in the style of Renaissance religious paintings, with the main characters shown several times in vignettes within each image, the tapestries illustrate key moments in Cope’s life. About In its Familiarity Golden, Perry writes: ‘This is the second half of Julie’s life. The title comes from another line in the poem I wrote, about how happiness isn’t “ecstasy, a fleeting peak” but rather “a wide fertile valley / In its familiarity, golden.” It’s the right idea that happiness is doing the quiet, regular, everyday things.’

In Battle of Britain, 2017, Perry creates a vista not dissimilar to the landscape of Essex that also, as the artist realised during its making, is redolent of Battle of Britain, 1941, by Paul Nash, one of Perry’s favourite paintings. He explains, ‘Having yet again acknowledged the power of the unconscious I continued with the work, playing up the associations and weaving in references to the current conflicts within our society.’

‘This piece echoes, in colour and technique, a vase I made for my first exhibition with the Victoria Miro gallery in 2004. That vase was called A Network of Cracks and it featured the table plan of the dinner at Tate Britain where I had won the Turner Prize the previous year. This piece collates the informal trends I have spotted in the contemporary art world in the forty years since the gallery opened. Every artist, perhaps secretly, harbours the fantasy that they are a true original, unaffected by the cultural trends around them. Go to any art fair and you will see works that look like a film director has rung up a prop maker and said “Get me a load of stuff that looks like contemporary art”. Most art will not end up in a collector’s house because it is too big or flimsy or awkward to install but everybody loves a pot.’ - Grayson Perry, 2025

"This large plate is based on a seventeenth century English slipware charger that I saw in a Milwaukee art museum. I adore the simple relaxed drawing on these early ceramics. The original also showed a lion with a ridiculous head of a leader probably the king. When a reporter asked Donald Trump when he was first elected if he would be phased by becoming president and boarding Airforce One he said no ‘I am a very stable genius’. This European style of slipware was something that early settlers reproduced on American soil. American collectors love early folk art so I imagined them a piece for today." Grayson Perry (2020)

Edition of 10 plus 3 artist's proofs

Overall dims: 108 x 60 x 60 cm

Pot dims: 68 x 39 x 39 cm

Shade dims: 35 x 60 x 60 cm

"This is a map of the Culture War that rages mainly online. I was thinking of cold war propaganda maps showing the ‘Communist Threat’ in the 1950’s. The godlike figure at the top is Mark Zuckerburg CEO of Facebook, I chose him because he is the best known face of social media power. Social media is mainly financed by advertising so those in charge want users to stay online as long as possible, the algorithms make this happen by encouraging conflict and outrage. The red arrows represent this feeding of negative emotion that keeps people scrolling. All the ships, planes and other combatants are labelled with the issues that swirl around this artificially polarised struggle. In the centre of the map is the presidential plane Airforce One colliding with a Russian bomber labelled ‘Climate Change’, when I made this print I thought that was the headline issue, but now I might have made the ‘Racism’ helicopter and the ‘Black Live Matter’ jet fighter more prominent. Hurricane ‘Woke’ off the east coast still seems very topical though." Grayson Perry (2020)

"This piece is also based on an early English press moulded slipware plate. A lot of these would have been produced around the time of the English civil war and often depicted King Charles, sometimes up an oak tree, sometimes on horseback. The civil war raging in the USA at the moment is of course the culture war. On this plate we have Donald Trump on horseback, his hat balanced on his impossible hair surrounded by tweeting birds. The art world has a strong left wing bias and artists often make work attacking the right from a patronising highly educated standpoint. Rather than change anyone’s mind this often has the opposite effect as the US is such an individualistic society that people will do the opposite of what lefty do-gooders say just because they refuse to be told what to do by an educated elite. The anger around wearing face masks in the US is a good example of this." Grayson Perry (2020)

"If I think of American cultural power the image that pops into my head is a huge abstract expressionist painting, a cold war symbol of a self confident ‘land of the free’. In those days New York was the white hot centre of the art world, now it is a hideously expensive liberal enclave. This tapestry is made up of layers that reflect some of the cultural and social archeology of Manhattan. The deepest layer is made up of historic textiles from the many cultures that make up the modern city, American, African, Asian and European. A virtual patchwork of quilts, rugs, blankets, flags and sacks. On top of this is splurged a Jackson Pollock style abstract painting a freewheeling gesture of macho cultural dominance. The outline map of Manhattan is on its side to fit in the landscape sweep of the AbEX painting but also to ram home how phallic it appears, the subway map forming its pulsing veins and arteries. The final layer is a series of pasted collage labels that between them lay out the economic, social and cultural forces that maintain the glass floor under the affluent liberal elite." Grayson Perry (2020)

"Ever since my first visit to the USA in the 1980’s I have been aware that it is a land prone to extremes. Extremes of natural beauty and strip mall crassness, right wing fanaticism and left wing dogma, alcoholic or teetotal, religious conservatism or hedonistic abandon, the cutting edge and the deepest traditions, rural isolation and cities that never sleep. The internet seems to have turbocharged this polarisation. Sanity, I feel, lies in the middle ground, I ride my bike down the middle, between the ditches of rigidity and chaos." Grayson Perry (2020)

Luxury Brands for Social Justice, 2017, looks at the assertion of identity through cultural or consumer choices and what these reveal about us, intentionally or otherwise.

Large Expensive Abstract Painting, 2019, is a tapestry that, bearing some of the hallmarks of twentieth century abstraction, is also a map of London – traversed by the familiar serpentine form of the Thames and containing words that appear to chime with the social forces, tastes and codes of their corresponding locations.

Credit Card, A13, Van Eyck, Microprocessor is a new tapestry created, Perry explains, because ‘I wanted to make something from the stuff of normal life, money, commuting, marriage, the internet. I layered the four images one on top of the other and then rubbed through them digitally until I could just about make out all four. It looks like a small worn carpet, a prayer mat, the first thing my feet might touch in the morning, grateful to be alive, another normal day.’

Chris Whitty’s Cat, 2020, was created as part of the first series of Grayson Perry’s acclaimed Grayson’s Art Club, broadcast on Channel 4. Writing about the work in 2020, Perry said, ‘When lockdown first started back in March my wife Philippa and I went for a walk around the deserted City of London one evening. We came back through Gough Square where Samuel Johnson’s house is and a sculpture of his cat Hodge. When I saw this small life-sized memorial to a pet I was inspired. I was thinking of London and its myths, like Dick Whittington whose cat has its own statue on Highgate Hill. Chris Whitty is the Chief Medical officer for England and Chief advisor to the government during the crisis. He has become the face of the Covid pandemic. Chris Whitty’s cat is a domestic scale monument to the strange year we are all living through. This plague cat is covered in pustules and boils made decorative. Its form is inspired by an ancient Islamic incense burner.’

Works on paper on view in Venice feature urban foxes. Perry writes, ‘I can remember the first time I saw an urban fox. I was so thrilled to see this piece of wildness wandering across the road nonchalantly. I like to go out on my bicycle around the town at night. They pop up all the time and their eyes glow in my lights. I have drawn, collaged and painted my encounters with Mr Fox.’

"Claire and Alan Measles in the style of early American folk art, togged out in nineteenth century European clothes arriving in the ‘New World’ to find a piece of land and start a new life. Problematic! In fact there are a lot of problematic elements to this innocent seeming work if you want to look for them. Have I drawn those flags with enough respect? Aren’t crossdressers just perpetuating unhelpful gender stereotypes? Teddy bears are a sentimentalisation of a noble wild animal and surely using an image of a child’s toy in a work about gender and sexuality is tantamount to paedophilia? Colonial settlers were stealing land from Native Americans and they might have been slave owners. They established a Eurocentric class system that still flourishes in the US today. The very style of this artwork reinforces the conservative world view that holds back innovative young artists. How dare I mock the brave pioneers by entangling them in my tawdry perverted fetishes. Etc etc etc." Grayson Perry (2020)

Alan Measles, Perry’s childhood teddy bear, who he also regards as ‘surrogate father, metaphor for God… and the benign dictator of my childhood’ features in numerous works, including Alan Healing the Wound, 2021. ‘As a child,’ Perry says ‘I projected a lot of stuff onto him . He became a kind of parent to me. I like to take Alan into different parts of world culture. I’ve been looking at amazing Chola bronzes from Southern India. I love the style. He’s a kind of Hindu deity mixed with a Christian reliquary Madonna and child. Alan the surrogate father goddess.’