This autumn Grayson Perry will exhibit his largest work to date, a monumental tapestry that is three metres high by fifteen metres long.
Designed specifically for the gallery's architecture The Walthamstow Tapestry runs the entire length of the top floor exhibition space at Victoria Miro 14. A number of new ceramic works will be presented alongside. The exhibition co-incides with the launch of a major monograph on the artist, with text by Jacky Klein and published by Thames & Hudson on 5 October.
The Walthamstow Tapestry explores the emotional resonance of brand names in our lives and our quasi-religious relationship to consumerism. Charting man's passage from birth to death, the tapestry is peppered with leading brands encountered along the way. Stripped of their logos and thus much of their identity, the names run alongside - often incongruous - depictions of people going about their everyday lives: walking the dog, nursing children, skateboarding, hoovering, and, of course, shopping. Perry is a great chronicler of contemporary life, in whose work sentiment and nostalgia sit subversively alongside fear and anger. In The Walthamstow Tapestry many of the world's leading names, from luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton and Tiffany to high street giants such as Marks and Spencer and IKEA, come under Perry's excoriating gaze in this cautionary and prophetic tale of modern day life. Inspired by antique batik fabrics from Malaysia as well as eastern European folk art this vast work provides a colourful, rich and complex visual journey across our contemporary landscape.
Grayson Perry by Jacky Klein will be published by Thames & Hudson on 5th October 2009, £35.00. The Walthamstow Tapestry is at Victoria Miro Gallery from 9 October - 7 November 2009. Admission is free, Tues - Sat 10am to 6pm. The Walthamstow Tapestry is published by The Paragon Press.
Background & Biography Grayson Perry, winner of the 2003 Turner Prize, uses the seductive qualities of ceramics and other art forms to make stealthy comments about societal injustices and hypocrisies, and to explore a variety of historical and contemporary themes. The beauty of his work is what draws us close. Covered with graffito drawings, handwritten and stencilled texts, photographic transfers and rich glazes, Perry's detailed pots are deeply alluring. Only when we are up close do we start to absorb narratives that might allude to dark subjects such as environmental disaster or child abuse, and even then the narrative flow can be hard to discern. The disparity between form and content and the relationship between the pots and the images that decorate them is perhaps the most challenging incongruity of Perry's work. Yet, beyond the initial shock of an apparently benign or conservative medium carrying challenging ideas, what keeps us drawn to the work is its variety. Autobiographical references - to the artist's childhood, his family and his transvestite alter ego Claire - can be read in tandem with debates about décor and decorum and the status of the artist versus that of the artisan, debates which Perry turns on their head. Born in Chelmsford, Essex in 1960, Grayson Perry lives and works in London. Grayson Perry won the Turner Prize in 2003 and has had major solo exhibitions at Mudam, Luxembourg (2008), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2007), Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2006), Barbican Art Gallery, London (2002) and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002). Grayson Perry has also curated two exhibitions - Unpopular Culture, de la Warr Pavilion (then touring) (2008) and The Charms of Lincolnshire, The Collection, Lincoln (2006).
NS Harsha: Picking through the Rubble 10 October - 14 November
Victoria Miro Gallery is delighed to present the first solo show at the gallery by Indian artist NS Harsha. Working across media including sculpture, installation and community-based collaborations, NS Harsha is known for his paintings that often depict fields of vast, sparsely detailed space populated by highly individuated figures in miniature as well as his installations that are often site-specific and political in scope. At Victoria Miro he will present a series of new paintings and an installation created specifically for the exhibition.
The works are loaded with intelligent political or social commentary, and draw on both popular culture and traditional narratives as they interweave local and international points of reference. Harsha has always been interested in art and its relationship with cultural representation and misrepresentation, and therefore location - whether geographical, political, social or cultural - plays an essential role.
A new group of paintings will be presented in the main gallery, all of which revolve around ideas of meaninglessness and the absurd. Taking on the challenge of representing on canvas the absurd within human nature, Harsha here furthers his exploration of humanity en masse, with an underlying sensitivity for the individual as well as the group. In his words, 'I continue to search for a way in which to portray large crowds or gatherings and their collective absurd acts. It is interesting to observe a crowd which has lost its collective rationale - or its attempt to achieve a collective rationale!'
Harsha's first engagement with these ideas resulted in the recent work Spot an innocent civilian, in which rows of standing halo-adorned figures appear as though they are part of an identification lineup, presumably for the viewer to appraise and determine the 'innocent' of the title. Harsha often invests his work with an awareness of the medium, in which the figures become an audience for a presupposed viewer, who in turn becomes complicit with or somehow activates the incident depicted. The work grew out of fascination with the term 'innocent civilian' repeatedly heard in media reports, which, for Harsha, came to signify another exploited byword used to various ends in the global political arena. He set himself the rather absurd task of trying to identify 'the innocence' in passers-by, a futile attempt to try and define sets of characteristics that might successfully define innocence. In the upstairs gallery Harsha will present a site-specific installation comprised of integrated painting and sculptural elements.
Picking through the Rubble will be presented at Victoria Miro Gallery from 10 October - 14 November. Iniva presents NS Harsha's grand-scale installation Nations at Rivington Place until 21 November. www.iniva.org
Background and Biography
Born in 1969, NS Harsha lives and works in Mysore, India.. He studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda 1995. Harsha was the recipient of the prestigious Artes Mundi 3 Prize in 2008 and has taken part in a variety of collaborative projects and exhibitions internationally.. Earlier this year he was included in the Indian Highway exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, the 9th Sharjah Biennial, Chalo! India: A New Era of Indian Art at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and an exhibition at the Valencia Institute of Modern Art, Spain. He had a solo presentation at Maison Hermes Tokyo in 2008 and was included in the Singapore Biennale 2006; 2nd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2002 and the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Arts Australia 1999.
