Sketchbooks

Product Information

The drawings in Sketchbooks chart the broadening of Perry's preoccupations from the purely personal to questions of class, gender, power and points in between, including the pomposity of the art world and the disquieting superficiality of Chris Huhne. There are preparatory diagrams for The Vanity of Small Differences, Perry's masterful series of tapestries depicting Britain's obsessive relationship with class and taste with Hogarthian relish. And designs for vases such as The Frivolous Now, a pot decorated with the specious terminology of modern life, such as "corporate spirituality", "hard working families" and "hen party Botox". A number of sections fold out into large panels, with text explaining the isolated image written by Perry himself.

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. Dismissed as a “craft”, pottery was viewed as domestic, feminine and working-class, but Perry realised with glee that “the vice squad was not going to raid an exhibition of pottery”. His delicate, intricate ceramics, inspired by classical forms, were a perfect canvas for debauched, lascivious details that lampooned British class, identity, and sexuality. A new catalogue book designed by Pony Ltd uncovers the process of creating the tapestries, and reveals insights into the lives of the people that inform them.Antenne Books is a distributor for independent publishers. Established in London in 2010, Antenne Books distributes publications on art, photography, design, illustration, theory, writing, fashion and culture.

I can make my drawings appear visually stronger by working over maps or newspaper to make my marks stronger. Raffish, good-natured, and quintessentially English in his propensity to say sorry, Perry is now at agonies to insist his comments were ill-informed. “I really did lose sleep over it – I thought, ‘Oh god they’re going to hate me!’” he says, clutching his head. “I just projected my own prejudices.” This is one of the reasons why Perry holds his sketchbooks so dear. Because they are done for his own private consumption, the drawings in them are “financially worthless” and so he is free to doodle and play as freely as he could when he was still an “artist’s artist”. The artist's primary inspiration was A Rake's Progress (1732 -33) by William Hogarth, which in eight paintings tells the story of Tom Rakewell, a young man who inherits a fortune from his miserly father, spends it all on fashionable pursuits and gambling, marries for money, gambles away a second fortune, goes to debtors' prison and dies in a madhouse. As I have become more successful and my prices have risen, drawings have become like currency, sometimes worth thousands of pounds. If I put a pen to paper it can feel like I have a version of the Midas touch – each mark becomes a pound sign. This makes me feel self-conscious, and I find it difficult to truly let go. I call this feeling “ Picasso Napkin Syndrome”. This refers to the fact that Picasso could pay for a meal in a restaurant with a sketch on the table linen.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.” In this pathway children are introduced to typography design and they explore how they can create their own fonts and designs. Children explore how we can use visual letters and other elements to help convey ideas and emotions. They are introduced to the work of an artist and a designer who have both used lettering combined with maps to produce maps which tell stories. Children then go on to create their own visual and often three dimensional maps. Themes: The exhibition (13 April – 2 September 2018) is produced in collaboration with La Monnaie de Paris museum, where it will be on view during autumn 2018. Perry’s ceramics, sculptures, prints and large-scale tapestries could have been made for this space.’ The tapestries tell the story of class mobility, for I think nothing has as strong an influence on our aesthetic taste as the social class in which we grow up. I am interested in the politics of consumerism and the story of popular design but, for this project, I focus on the emotional investment we make in the things we choose to live with, wear, eat, read or drive. Class and taste run deep in our character – we care. This emotional charge is what draws me to a subject. Grayson Perry.