Grayson Perry: Maps and Tapestries

In his own description, Grayson Perry is a ‘transvestite potter from Essex’. Since he was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003, Perry has developed a unique position in public life and explored new media besides pottery that include printmaking and tapestry. He is the only artist who has delivered the Reith Lectures, and he was awarded a knighthood in 2023. He cannibalises social issues and historical visual cultures, and his work crystallises them through the prism of a highly subjective viewpoint, often one that the artist has assumed or self-consciously constructed. For his exhibition at the Wallace Collection in 2025 he invented the Eastender Shirley Smith (alias The Hon. Millicent Wallace), who believes herself the rightful heir to Hertford House in Manchester Square.

Piano Nobile is pleased to present a display including several of Perry’s ‘map’ prints and a recent tapestry, Fascist Swing (2025), which reimagines Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s rococo masterpiece The Swing in psychedelic technicolour. Grayson Perry’s sense of humour is by turns raucous, mordant and parodic, and in the tradition of Hogarth he makes his point with the most piquant imagery imaginable. A selection of map etchings includes The American Dream (2021), in which Mark Zuckerberg becomes a sky god emanating poisonous tentacles labelled ‘bitter resentment’, ‘fear’, ‘disturbed’, and so on. Recent woodcuts in the display include Vote for Me!, a self-portrait in which Perry fashions himself as Margaret Thatcher. The display is complemented by two early ceramic platters, Sales Pitch (1987) and Essex, Middlesex, Sussex (1998).

"I had never thought of making prints until I was at a friend’s house and saw a print by an artist who’d drawn a map of the world from memory. It was a large etching in a glass frame and I really liked it as an object. I realized that this was a subset of objects that I was interested in: something on a domestic scale with a long tradition, like those framed maps of counties that posh houses often have in their loos."

Grayson Perry

"[Fascist Swing, 2025] is Shirley Smith's own version of the most famous painting in the Wallace Collection, The Swing, painted in 1768 by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Shirley downplays the erotic subject matter of the original and the two men disappear into the background leaving the demonic heroine glowing centre-stage. Obsessively hand-sewn onto a patchwork of cheap domestic fabrics from the 1960s and 1970s, the Rococo froth is reinterpreted as a writhing mass of psychedelic curlicues. The title derives from the fact that the word 'fascist' was sewn several times onto the fabric before the main image was applied. This has been interpreted by modern commentators as 'a proto-craftivist outburst against the government and aristocracy for their refusal to restore Shirley Smith's birthright'."

Grayson Perry

"[In The Walthamstow Tapestry] brands are stripped of their logos and associated imagery, leaving only 'the emotional resonance of the brand, rather than a literal advert. The word just gives you a little sugar rush of emotion that is connected to it. The incidents in the tapestry are loaded up with a collage of feelings that are associated with the different products and services, like a great parade of marketing that has been invading our heads."

 Grayson Perry

"When I was working on [England as seen from Lockdown in Islington, 2021], I was thinking about how we were all travelling in our imaginations. I’ve put the background of floral material there. So very English. It evokes an idea of England, but a kind of trapped, slightly stifling suburban idea of England."

Grayson Perry

"I enjoyed the anti-fine art ethos of it. Pottery felt like something that was unfashionable; the dismissive attitude of a lot of fine art people to ceramics actually inspired me."

Grayson Perry

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