Latest news with #GraysonPerry:DelusionsofGrandeur
Jordan Times
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Jordan Times
UK artist Grayson Perry indulges playful side in new show
Grayson Perry poses for a photograph beside 'The Great Beauty', a piece made from oak, brass and ceramics, during a photocall for 'Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur' at The Wallace Collection in London (AFP photo) LONDON — It was a radical idea: give UK artist Grayson Perry, known for his cross-dressing and flamboyant, colourful art, carte blanche to create new works inspired by one of the world's finest collections of decorative arts. The result, which is going on show at London's Wallace Collection museum, is surprising, as well as full of mischief and fun. "I gave me permission to sort of play," the eccentric artist told reporters on Tuesday. "I think that... as an artist, especially as you get older, you've got to give yourself permission to play, mess around, have fun, enjoy making things." Some 40 totally new works by the artist will be on show from March 28 in the exhibition "Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur" at the Wallace. The collection normally houses paintings from the 14th to the 19th centuries by artists such as Titian, Velazquez, Rubens and Van Dyck alongside arms and armour, and enamel, glass and bronze artworks. "I was walking around the museum, and I realised that there was a lot of the work that I liked, but I didn't love," Perry said, with a pink bell-shaped hat clamped on his blond hair, and wearing a patterned pink, red and orange burlesque ensemble. "I came up with this idea that I needed to invent an artist who loved the Wallace collection beyond measure." To help him, Perry invented an alter ego: the unknown and fragile artist Shirley Smith, who thinks she is Millicent Wallace, heiress to the collection. "And so this is a sort of collaboration between me, her and the Wallace collection," added Perry, who was knighted in 2023 for his contribution to the arts. Perry, 65, a winner of the prestigious Turner Prize, has become a household name thanks to numerous appearances on television including this year's celebrity singing competition "The Masked Singer", in which he was disguised as a kingfisher. His 40 new creations include sculptures, tapestries, drawings and ceramics inspired by the works in the Wallace -- in the museum's largest ever contemporary exhibition. 'Having fun' One new work is based on an 18th-century bronze of a musician, but coloured pearls have been replaced by bits of shells and stones, in a Rococo style. And since politics is never far from Perry's works, the musician sports a cape adorned with protest badges denouncing austerity policies or supporting various charities. Less directly provocative than other Perry collections, these new creations still recall the contemporary issues and familiar themes which thread through his works. In one work, "Fascist Swing", Perry thumbs his nose at artists who claim to be activists and for whom the word "fascist is an easy insult". "He's having fun creating things. He's... playing with badges and shells and making the pots and making things out of clay," Xavier Bray, director of the Wallace Collection, told AFP. "At the same time, he's also aware that there are modern techniques such as artificial intelligence, which he uses for his self-portraits. "And then with that, he starts layering it with meaning, with symbols, with words, with signs, to... bring out the sort of social context."
Telegraph
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur: An awkward, snarky venture devoid of class and wit
What an awkward, snarky venture Grayson Perry 's new exhibition proves to be. The root cause of the problem? His disdain for the Wallace Collection to which he was invited to respond. Bagging a show by Perry – who has worked successfully with other museums in the past – must have seemed like a coup. Surely, his indestructible popularity would attract new audiences to this national museum just north of London's Oxford Street, which deserves improved footfall? Recently, Perry, a brilliant media personality, popped up dressed as a kingfisher on The Masked Singer on ITV. Yet, when he engaged with, as he puts it, 'all the gold and sprawling nudes, the curlicues, cartouches and cherubs' at Hertford House, he was left cold. ('I found it cloying,' he says.) So, he came up with a character who, he explains, could 'love' the Wallace 'for me': working-class Shirley Smith, a self-taught artist from Barking, who believed herself to be the 'rightful heir' of its founder, Sir Richard Wallace. Drawings supposedly by Smith appear in Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur, along with black-and-white photographs of Perry, in drag, pretending to be her within the museum's interiors. It's all very arch and over-elaborate, and fails to mask the fact that working on this show seemingly never got Perry's creative juices flowing. At points, his irritation with the project is palpable. In a label, he describes Vase, Eighteenth Century, French, one of several new pots he's produced for the exhibition (alongside tapestries and works on paper), as 'a grumpy outburst in pottery form', a self-consciously 'chunky, crude and earthy' rebuke to 'hyper-refined and crafted 18th-century Sèvres porcelain', which, he continues, 'I have come to loathe'. Okay, so he hates French Rococo style – but, given that this is a speciality of the Wallace Collection, why take this exhibition on? Uninspired, he resorts to addressing themes concerning class, money, and taste that he's tackled umpteen times before, while mimicking, even ripping off, what used to be called 'outsider art', such as Russian 'lubok' prints or the drawings of Madge Gill. It's annoying: Perry's magpie-like, imitative art is so much cleaner and more marketable than its sources. Why is this rich insider (who was knighted a couple of years ago) still masquerading as an outsider when it comes to the visual conventions he adopts? In another label, he confesses, randomly, to a 'persistent prejudice' regarding 'West London': whenever he passes Oxford Circus, he writes, 'I imagine I can smell a great sense of entitlement emanating from people who live in a cossetted bubble of beige international wealth.' While the (centrally located) Wallace Collection may be a sort of palace of historical privilege, it is anything but 'beige'. Perry likes to tease and provoke, but, here, while thumbing his nose, he just comes across as sullen. Where's his famous wit? It's possible, I suppose, he's articulating what some people may feel: that the Wallace Collection is a bastion of elitism, and a turn-off for ordinary gallery-goers. Even if this were true (and I'm unconvinced), I fail to see how the Wallace Collection is served by such a stroppy show.
