About the Exhibition

In January 2018, The Gallery at Windsor presented the first annual exhibition at Windsor in a three-year curatorial collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts, London featuring the work of celebrated British artist and Turner Prize winner, Grayson Perry CBE.

The Hon. Hilary M. Weston, Windsor co-founder and Creative Director for The Gallery at Windsor, Christopher Le Brun, painter and former President of the Royal Academy, and Tim Marlow, former Artistic Director of the Royal Academy selected Perry as the first artist in a series of three exhibitions featuring Royal Academicians. The exhibition Making Meaning offered an overview of Perry’s work, exploring themes of Britishness, identity, craftsmanship and the art establishment.

A vivid chronicler of contemporary life, Perry boldly tackles subjects that are universally human, such as identity, gender, social status, sexuality and religion. The exhibition included some of his major works in ceramic, tapestry, sculpture and etching, as well as the monumental tapestry Comfort Blanket, exhibited in Perry’s acclaimed National Portrait Gallery, London exhibition Who are you?

Making Meaning was curated by Erin Manns, Director of Exhibitions, Victoria Miro, London. A fully illustrated catalogue published by Windsor Press and the Royal Academy accompanied the exhibition and includes a foreword by The Hon. Hilary M. Weston, an essay by British biographer and critic Jenny Uglow and an interview with Grayson Perry by Tim Marlow.

About the Artist

Born in Chelmsford, Essex in 1960, Grayson Perry lives and works in London. He uses the seductive qualities of ceramics and other traditional art forms, including cast iron, bronze, printmaking and tapestry, to make stealthy comments about society, past and present, and its pleasures as well as its injustices and flaws. Autobiographical references – to the artist’s childhood, his family and his transvestite alter ego Claire – can be read in tandem with questions about décor and decorum, class and taste, and the status of the artist versus that of the artisan.

Winner of the 2003 Turner Prize, Perry was elected a Royal Academician in 2012, and received a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List in 2013; he has been awarded the prestigious appointments of Trustee of the British Museum and Chancellor of the University of the Arts, London (both in 2015), and received a RIBA Honorary Fellowship in 2016.

The Vanity of Small Differences, Perry’s monumental suite of tapestries exploring the subject of taste in contemporary Britain, was first shown at Victoria Miro, London, in 2012 and was acquired by The Arts Council Collection and British Council and has subsequently toured throughout the UK and Europe. The making of these works was chronicled in the first of Perry’s Channel 4 television series, All In the Best Possible Taste, a 2013 Bafta Specialist Factual winner. Perry’s second Bafta-winning television series Who Are You?, about identity, was broadcast in 2014, accompanied by a solo presentation of works at the National Portrait Gallery, London. The series All Man, which considered masculinity, followed in 2016, with Allen Lane publishing the related book The Descent of Man.

Perry delivered The Reith Lectures, BBC Radio 4’s annual flagship talk series, in 2013; his ensuing book Playing to the Gallery is published by Penguin. The artist’s A House for Essex, a permanent building designed in collaboration with FAT Architecture, was constructed in the North Essex countryside in 2015.

Work by the artist is held in museum collections worldwide, including The British Museum, London, Tate Collection, London, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Museum of Modern Art, New York, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Victoria & Albert Museum, London and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven among many others.