GRAYSON PERRY | Oiks, Tarts, Wierdoes and Contemporary Art

Laurent Delaye Gallery, London Saatchi Collection, London 

Phillips de Pury & Company, London, 28 February 2008, Lot 188 (consigned by the above)

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is warmer and less blue in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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London based artist and winner of the 2003 Turner Prize, Grayson Perry is one of the most astute chroniclers of contemporary society. His work encompasses a variety of traditional media including tapestry, cast iron, bronze and printmaking; however, it is his ceramic vases that have garnered him the most critical acclaim. With wry humour, a frequently satirical viewpoint, and an astonishing imaginative flair, Perry’s pots satirise and unpick art historical reverence, pastiche his contemporaries, and explore universally relevant subjects about social status, gender, sexuality and religion. Incorporating Perry’s trademark array of provocative contemporary references, as the title suggests, Oiks, Tarts, Wierdoes and Contemporary Art depicts a medley of incongruous characters from different social backgrounds. Similar to the artist's celebrated work I Want To Be An Artist, in which he pays tribute to two of his favourite American forebears – Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat – the present works depicts the revered British artist Lucian Freud. Perry’s oeuvre was recently championed in a landmark exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery from June to September 2017. Other works by the artist are held in several museum collections worldwide, including The British Museum, London; Tate Collection, London; Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum; Amsterdam; and Victoria & Albert Museum, London, among many others. Perry first started making pottery in the early 1980s. Exploiting the medium’s association with craft, domesticity and decoration, the artist’s preferred artistic vehicle – the vase – also references historic archetypes. Within the contemporary art world crafts and decorative arts are often condemned as a lesser art form. However, it was precisely this disdain from critics that drew Perry to ceramics. Like the Ancient Greeks, Perry employed this allegorical medium to elevate the commonplace dramas of modern life. As Perry has pointed out: “My pots always carry with them the intellectual baggage of the history of ceramics, its archaeology, geography and value system. But up close, the content of my work can confound all that” (Grayson Perry cited in: Jacky Klein, Grayson Perry, London 2009, p. 242). As much as they take inspiration from traditional Chinese vases or ancient Egyptian pottery, Perry’s ceramics compound a wealth of contemporary iconography that ranges from trashy magazines to fast-food menus. This iconoclastic mix also includes strong autobiographical references; images of Perry as ‘Claire’ as well as his childhood teddy bear ‘Alan Measles’ can often be found in his work. 

Laboriously handcrafting each pot by hand, Perry shuns the model of the mini-factory propounded by many of today’s artists. A contemporary of the YBAs, he has resisted any attempts at conventional categorisation and has remained a troupe of his own. As Jacky Klein astutely explained: “He descends not from the obvious forebears of contemporary art such as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, but from a rather different line: that of the great satirists. In its bawdy humour, his art recalls the eighteenth and nineteenth-century caricaturists William Hogarth, James Gillray and George Cruikshank. His quirky and literary wit echoes that of Aubrey Beardsley and Wyndham Lewis, while his linear drawing style and predilection for social comment, erotica and the grotesque are reminiscent of the work of Otto Dix, George Grosz and the Expressionists whose art flourished in the smoky nightclubs of 1920s Berlin” (Jacky Klein cited in:  Ibid., p. 10).

Quintessential Perry, Oiks, Tarts, Wierdoes and Contemporary Art is a paradigm of the artist’s unique ability to translate witty, nostalgic and often disturbing scenes from contemporary life into universal truths about the human condition.