Grayson Perry and Claire dress up for Sydney

Grayson Perry, My Pretty Little Art Career
Museum of Contemporary Art,
Sydney Sydney International Art Series December 10 – May 1 

One of the world’s most famous cross dressers will be in town when Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art hosts Grayson Perry’s exhibition “My Pretty Little Art Career” at the end of the year.

The exhibition is the companion show to “The Greats” featuring works from The Scottish Galleries, which will be on in Sydney at the Gallery of New South Wales from October 24. Gaining prominence partly because of the way he often dresses as his alter ego Claire, the artist who won the Turner Prize in 2003 is best known for his beautifully crafted pots decorated with a mixture of mundane, uncomfortable and ironic images.

His subversive art combines autobiographical references from his childhood through to his life as a successful artist, with sharp social commentary on class, taste, consumerism, war, and art versus craft.

Then there is Claire who has appeared in a variety of creations. Perry says of her, “One of the reasons I dress up as a woman is my low self-esteem, to go with the image of women being seen as second class … It is like pottery: that’s seen as a second-class thing too.”

Over the past few years he has also been producing large tapestries decorated with elaborate details in which he combines contemporary scenes and figures in rewordings of notable works of Western and Eastern art. One of his most famous works, which will be included in his show is “The Walthamstow Tapestry” from 2009.

The fifteen-metre long work, which contains hundreds of brand names and figures (inspired by Perry's interest in the imagery of Sumatran batik fabrics) recounts the seven ages of man in a modern version of Hogarth’s “The Rakes Progress.”

Last year the work hit the headlines when it sold to The China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, one of the first acquisitions of a foreign living artist by a major Chinese institution, which generally favours local contemporary artists. Also on show will be the large tapestry from the collection of the Gallery of New South Wales “The Map of Truths and Beliefs” which is currently on display at the gallery.

Of this work Perry said “I wanted it to be a sort of altarpiece, a map of humanity.” He sees it as representing the clash of the prosaic and the spiriutial and has included the names of various places of pilgrimage sites, religious, secular and historical. In the centre of the work is a portrait of his childhood teddybear Alan Measles, who is portrayed as the eye of god. Among the large pots on show will be the “Rosetta Vase” of 2011.

It is a large yellow pot with blue figures and inscriptions referring to the way that different cultural ideas and concepts need to be read in parallel with each other, like the Rosetta Stone. One of the figures on the vase is labelled ‘The Artist’ and is divided up in into sections each labelled with part of his (or our) personality – ‘legacy of childhood’, ‘hubris’, ‘play’, ‘curiosity’, ‘fantasy world’, ‘autobiography’, ‘class’, ‘ vanity’ and ‘veiled existential thoughts’.

Throughout the works Perry explores themes such as the history of taste and social class in Britain, religious and folk iconography and the representations of sexuality and masculinity. A few years ago he took Alan Measles on several tours of the UK and Germany with the bear in a glass cabinet on the rear of the bike. He saw this as a travelling shrine and his journey a pilgrimage to take Alan to the people.

Hopefully the bike and bear will come for the exhibition but if not the gallery will most likely show the film of his German pilgrimage. Not only has the artist been able to make art more accessible by blurring the distinctions between high art and popular culture he has also shown that the crafts have the same importance as the other art forms.

Grayson Perry will be present for the opening events, delivering a keynote lecture to open the show. This is a must-see event as he was the first practising artist to deliver a series of Reith Lecture on the BBC in 2013. He spoke about contemporary art and the world in which it is made, exhibited, sold and collected to much acclaim although some regarded his delivery as very much a triumph of style over content.

The MCA has partnered with hip designer hotel QT Sydney (NBR August 29) to offer an accommodation package available for the duration of the exhibition. Packages start from $295 a night and include a double pass to the exhibition ($40 each)

Use MyNBR Tags to track people and companies — and receive key-word email alerts. Find out how here.