Artworks

Completed in 2018, Searching for Authenticity was created by Grayson Perry for his 2019 exhibition Super Rich Interior Decoration – the artist’s first solo exhibition at Victoria Miro since 2012 and his first at Victoria Miro Mayfair. In this body of work, Perry casts an anthropological eye on the heady collision of art, money, power and desire. Searching for Authenticity addresses one of the exhibition’s key themes: the assertion of identity through cultural or consumer choices and what these reveal about us, intentionally or otherwise. Decorated with images of beaming individuals, blissfully happy at work or at sun-kissed leisure, Searching for Authenticity broaches the slippery concepts of meaning and significance, life and lifestyle – what can be authentically experienced or simply acquired. Writing at the time of the exhibition, Perry commented, ‘the narcissistic Instagram culture is a main theme. I often think that when people go on holiday they want to appear in the photographs they have seen in the brochure. Much of online life seems to follow this pattern, and the banal orthodoxies of what is seen to be beautiful, creative, meaningful, inspiring, passionate, cute or edgy are the starting point for a number of the vases in this show. Searching for Authenticity comes from my fascination with the rapidly crystallising clichés of the so-called “experience economy”. The global conformity of those who refuse to be labelled.’