Artist Sir Grayson Perry will celebrate his 65th birthday in style — with a major exhibition at London’s magnificent Wallace Collection.
Titled Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur and opening on 28 March 2025, the show will explore some of the themes and inspirations he has explored in his art throughout his long career.
The Wallace Collection — a 126-year-old London museum that’s home to a world-class fine art collection featuring artists such as Titian, Velázquez, Rubens and Van Dyck — is full of inspiration for the Turner Prize-winning Perry.
Which is why Perry has produced over 40 brand new and never-seen-before works specially for the show. They will reflect and echo key inspirational Wallace objects that excitingly will also be displayed alongside.
Delusions of Grandeur will in fact be the largest contemporary art exhibition ever held at the museum. AND, it will open on the very day Grayson Perry turns 65.
— Get the latest exhibition news delivered to your inbox by subscribing to our free newsletter
Visitors are in for a treat, with a show that will be an elaborate commentary on the very nature of making and collecting art, and which will touch upon a variety of fascinating themes such as the creation of domestic space, the gendering of decoration, and perceived perfection versus authenticity.
Grayson Perry's Wallace Collection inspirations
Perry as a young artist was intrigued by the dichotomy at the Wallace Collection.
Its displays of extreme femininity from the 18th century French Rococo alongside overt masculinity of arms and armour is what first caught his attention early in his career.
He also had a childhood love of François Boucher’s Portrait of Madame de Pompadour (1759) in the collection of the Wallace. It is well documented as having inspired some of Perry's his work.
The results of this can be seen in how historically rigid gender roles has been a recurring subject throughout Perry’s decades-long career. It's a theme that unsurprisingly will then also be reflected in this new exhibition.
But many other pieces from the museum have also influenced him over his lifetime, including a superb group of English miniature portraits, and an early 18th-century bronze of Mezzetin, a stock comic character of the Italian commedia dell'arte, soulfully strumming his guitar.
The diversity of the works in the Wallace Collection will be matched by the diversity of materials Perry will use for his new artworks.
On show will be items utilising ceramics, sculpture, textile, collage and painting, and the museum is saying this exhibition will in fact feature the widest variety of techniques, genres and forms that Perry has ever employed for a single show.
Delusions of Grandeur will also ask visitors to think about authenticity in creating art.
Intricate handcrafted objects will be shown alongside works made with digital technology, so people will be able to directly compare an object that may have taken thousands of hours to create against one that was possible with the click of a button.
Through these contrasting approaches, Perry will be playfully asking the viewer to interrogate the very nature of craft-making and our drive for perfectionism.
Perry will also intriguingly create a fictional persona for the show, in order to explore the concept of ‘outsider art.’
While developing the exhibition, the fictional character of Shirley Smith came into being, a woman who wakes up in Hertford House — the Wallace Collection home minutes from Oxford Street in central London — after a mental health crisis. She believes herself to be the rightful heir to the treasures that surround her.
Through ancestral portraits and Old Master copies, this imagined life will touch on the real stories, influences and difficult experiences that art can bring to the fore.
'Outsider art' will also be explored with the inclusion of works by Aloïse Corbaz and Madge Gill.
Sparked by the discovery that Madge Gill (1882-1961) had exhibited at the Wallace Collection in 1942, the life and work of these outsider artists has helped unlock Perry’s own response, which also draws upon his own childhood experiences.
Speaking about his exhibition candidly, Grayson Perry said that this show offered a really unique challenge. Because while he was "captivated by the craftsmanship seen in the collection" he revealed he also "struggled with the opulent aesthetic which I found cloying at times."
But, he said that "fortunately, I worked out a strategy that helped me find a fresh perspective/" Perry has thanked the museum's Director Xavier Bray for "planting the seed of this exhibition" in his head.
Bray himself said when announcing this new show that he hopes it will “surprise and intrigue visitors” and that the time he has spent with Perry creating it "has provided me with a new perspective on the Collection, and I cannot wait to share the vision with the public."
The exhibition will follow a smaller-scale London showing of Perry's works. In the second half of 2024, West London's Pizthanger Manor and Gallery is hosting the touring exhibition of Perry's tapestries The Vanity of Small Differences. These pieces offer a 21st century re-examination of William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress and excitingly, their display at Pitzhanger means they are being shown in a former home of Hogarth's 18th century masterpieces.
Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur will open at the Wallace Collection on 28 March 2025.