Grayson Perry at BMAG

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery is proud to be the first venue in the Midlands to present ‘The Vanity of Small Differences’ by Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry. The exhibition, open 14 February – 11 May 2014 is comprised of a series of six large tapestries (2m x 4m) which tell the story of class mobility and the influence social class has on our aesthetic taste.

Inspired by William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, the six tapestries chart the “class journey” made by the fictional Tim Rakewell and include many of the characters, incidents and objects that Grayson Perry encountered on his own journeys through Sunderland, Tunbridge Wells and the Cotswolds for the television series ‘All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry’.

In the television series Perry went “on a safari amongst the taste tribes of Britain”, to gather inspiration for his artwork, literally weaving the characters he meets into a narrative, with an attention to the minutiae of contemporary taste every bit as acute as that in Hogarth’s 18th century artworks.

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