“… my work has always had a guerrilla tactic, a stealth tactic. I want to make something that lives with the eye as a beautiful piece of art, but on closer inspection, a polemic or ideology will come out of it.”
Grayson Perry's work offers endless surprises, touching us with its satire, sadness, anger, humor and hurt. Perry (British, b. 1960), is a contemporary British artist best known for his ceramics, paintings, tapestries and large-scale engravings. His work explores themes of gender and society, often drawing on personal experiences, and is infused with his characteristic British wit. Among his many accomplishments, Grayson Perry won the Turner Prize in 2003, was awarded the title of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2013 and became a member of the Royal Academy in the fall of 2015.
This summer, Galerie Maximillian will feature his most recent print project - a magnificent new woodcut and related engravings, of a half bull, half bear that was inspired by the symbolic beasts, or “animal spirits,” that control the financial markets.
“During the coverage of the crash of the financial markets in 2008 we heard a lot about ‘animal spirits’, says Perry.“The financial sector is still male-dominated and men often seem to talk as if emotions are ‘women’s business’ and they somehow operate in this entirely objective universe. There seemed to be an idea that the market was entirely rational but we found out in the crash that it was just as prone to emotional weather as any human system.”
“This print shows my symbolic representation of the irrational beast that controls the market, half bull, half bear. He - and it most definitely is a he, is surrounded by symbols taken from the names of patterns seen in Japanese Candlestick graphs.These are graphs that were supposedly invented by 16th Century Japanese rice traders to help them understand the fluctuations in their market and they are still used today on the computer screens of city traders. Certain patterns have colorful names such as Abandoned Baby, Hanging Man, Shooting Star, Dark Cloud Cover, Gravestone Doji, Three Black Crows and Concealing Baby Swallow.” — Grayson Perry