This is England

At the Turner Prize dinner of 2003, as the winner, Grayson Perry, took a photo call with his family wearing a girlish dress and huge bow in his hair, a German contemporary artist who was sitting at the same table leant over and hissed in my ear, ‘Only in England!’ He got it right in more than one way.

As time goes on it becomes ever more apparent that — in his combination of grittiness, eloquence and wackiness — Perry is very much in the national grain. He even manages to look like a sort of Identikit British archetype, resembling, in different images he presents of himself, Margaret Thatcher, Alice in Wonderland and Richard III.

No doubt, at some point in the future there will be a grand-scale overview of Perry’s work at the Tate or RA. But in the meantime, Provincial Punk, a medium-sized retrospective at Turner Contemporary, Margate, gives an opportunity to assess where he has arrived right now. He emerges as a late developer who has blossomed remarkably in middle age.

His first breakthrough came in the early 1980s, when he began to make and decorate pots. It was a brilliant move, partly because his paintings — as can be seen from some watercolours in the show — aren’t quite strong enough to make an impact on their own. By putting his pictures — violent, erotic and bizarre — on to an object as intrinsically retro as a handmade vase or urn, he set up an intriguing yin-yang conflict. This is summed up in the title of a piece from 1995: ‘Sex, Drugs and Earthenware’.

Perry was combining aspects of himself that he defined as ‘the twee and nostalgic side of myself’ — which is ‘a bit hobbity’ — and the mischievously aggressive punk.