Exhibition of the week Grayson Perry: The Pre-Therapy Years
The Holburne Museum, Bath (01225-388569, holburne.org). Until 3 January 2021
By any standard, Grayson Perry’s career has been a “phenomenal success”, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. The self-styled “transvestite potter”, known for sometimes adopting the “flamboyant persona” of his female alter ego Claire, is a Turner Prize winner and elected member of the Royal Academy whose work has been exhibited in some of the world’s most prestigious museums. He has also written “bestselling books”, presented awardwinning TV shows, and been appointed CBE. Yet Perry’s elevation to “national treasure” was hard won: for much of the 1980s and 1990s, he toiled in obscurity, making a pittance. This exhibition is the first survey of the work he produced in that period, one unknown to all but his most devoted fans. Charting his progress from 1982, when he graduated from art school, to 1994, the year of his first major London show, the exhibition brings together 70 exhibits – and plunges us into the mind of a determined oddball working an era when cross-dressing was considered a “furtive perversion” and pottery (even that of Perry’s ribald variety) could hardly have been more unfashionable. Highly entertaining, it builds a picture of how a “shy” outsider from Essex rose to art superstardom.
Anyone familiar with Perry’s later work will recognise many of its preoccupations in the juvenilia on display here, said Hettie Judah in the I newspaper. The artist’s trademark themes – sex, social commentary and satirical humour – occur time and again. Yet the Perry of the 1980s was altogether angrier than the artist of today, and his work more explicit. The early ceramics are gratuitously offensive, depicting scenes of “mutilation, veneration, masturbation and fellation”. One vase sports an image of a woman with “a slavering dog’s head extending from her pudenda”; a piece from 1984 – Saint Diana, Let Them Eat Shit – imagines the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey as a commode, complete with a “large clay turd”. Yet throughout, he also shows an amusing degree of selfawareness: a 1987 platter titled
Sales Pitch, for instance, is stamped with text promising prospective buyers that they’d be investing their money well.
Perry was never “the most gifted potter”, said Alastair Smart in The Daily Telegraph. But it is often his rudimentary skills that make the work so interesting. A good example is Self-Portrait Cracked and Warped
(c.1985), which is “so named because it developed a massive crack in the kiln”. It’s tempting to see this as a commentary on its cross-dressing creator’s “split self”, and all the more so when you realise that the title of the exhibition is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that he began seeing a psychotherapist in the mid1990s. Perry’s early work is rough-edged, and thrillingly subversive – arguably rather more so than much of his recent output. This show is a welcome reminder of “what a riveting artist he once was”.