Sketchbooks

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The exhibition (now extended until 3 January 2021) is the first to survey works made by the artist between 1982 and 1994. These ground-breaking ‘lost’ pots have been reunited for the first time to focus on the formative years of one of Britain’s most recognisable artists. Preceding the close-up plates are some extracts from Perrys sketchbooks, showing preparatory notes and the charming, crudely drawn doodlings that went on to create the final characters, compositions and stories. Time This pathway takes 6 weeks, with an hour per week. Shorten or lengthen the suggested pathway according to time and experience. Follow the stages in green for a shorter pathway or less complex journey. I can use my mark making, cutting and collage skills to create my own visual map, using symbols, drawn elements and typography to express themes which are important to me.

I make the work I like. But a nice spinoff benefit of that is that I bring a kind of audience that isn’t necessarily solely into difficult, conceptualized 21st-century art." The Vanity of Small Differences is a series of six large-scale tapestries by the Turner-Prize winning artist Grayson Perry. In The Vanity of Small Differences Grayson Perry explores his fascination with taste and the visual story it tells of our interior lives in a series of six tapestries at Victoria Miro and three programmes, All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry, for Channel 4. The artist goes on a safari amongst the taste tribes of Britain, to gather inspiration for his artworks, literally weaving the characters he meets into a narrative partly inspired by Hogarth's A Rake's Progress.It’s a wonderfully compelling show – warm, open, hilariously funny at times, and poignantly tragic at others. Grayson Perry: The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! reviewed by Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times

Yeah, it’s quite a social space,” says Perry. “I had this fantasy of myself as a very self-contained artist, but I get a lot of my ideas in conversation. Most of them are my wife’s of course… I like trying out ideas on people, seeing if they wind them up, which is what I’m always after.” A number of sections fold out into large panels, with text explaining the isolated image written by Perry himself.

Exhibition

Launching at 8pm on 27 April 2020, the series will offer master classes, top tips and inspiration. Each episode of Art Club will be themed, and Grayson is asking members of the public to send in artwork responding to each theme.

The tapestries look at English class through the story of the life of Tim Rakewell, and his progress through modern British society from humble birth to famous death. They are composed of characters, places and objects that Perry encountered on his travels through Sunderland, Tunbridge Wells and the Cotswolds. As well as drawing on these experiences, Perry also took inspiration from art-historical imagery: often early Renaissance religious works but also, and most importantly, William Hogarth’s series of paintings A Rake’s Progress (1733), which tells the story of the rise and fall of a young man who loses his inherited fortune through a series of bad decisions. The Vanity of Small Differences is jointly owned by the British Council Collection and the Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. Gift of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, with the support of Channel 4 Television, the Art Fund and Sfumato Foundation with additional support from Alix Partners. Funny, witty and visually delightful" – ★★★★★ from Matthew Collings for Grayson Perry's Serpentine show.

Gallery Exhibitions: Current and Upcoming

Tapestry is an art form historically often used to decorate the homes of aristocratic families with religious, military or mythical scenes, so Perry plays with the status of tapestry by using it to depict everyday scenarios and characters. The artist’s works are rich in both content and colour, incorporating autobiographical references as well as mapping contemporary British society. Now in his mid-50s, he is in possession of a certain rapscallion charm. As Claire, however, he confides: “I was never a sex bomb.” Originally modelled on female news anchors, with Princess Diana and Camilla Parker-Bowles thrown into the mix, the Claire of the past was a tad mumsy in her stiff pencil skirts, prudent and modestly dressed.