iMuseo Franz MayerCentro Histórico
La vanidad de las pequeñas diferencias. Grayson Perry
The Vanity of Small Differences: Grayson Perry's tapestries after Hogarth's A Rake's Progress on class and taste, with historic prints from the Arts Council Collection.
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Preview: written before the show opened
In the first tapestry, baby Tim Rakewell reaches for his mother's smartphone while two cage fighters kneel with gifts: a Sunderland football shirt and a miner's lamp. Grayson Perry based the scene on Mantegna's Adoration of the Shepherds, and the five tapestries after it follow Tim up the English class system to a fatal crash in his Ferrari.
This is Perry's first solo show in Mexico, arriving from San Luis Potosí and going on to Guadalajara. The six tapestries, each 2 by 4 metres, hang with the eight prints of Hogarth's A Rake's Progress, the story Perry rewrote, plus his 2001 ceramic Pueblo de los Penians and his 2008 print Map of Nowhere. You get a show about how taste gives your class away, inside a museum built on one banker's silver and porcelain.
It opens 4 December in Temporales III, Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 17:00. The Franz Mayer lists it until 9 May 2027; the touring organiser says 28 March. The museum hasn't published a ticket price yet.
Editor's pick
Six four-metre tapestries hang beside the eight Hogarth prints of A Rake's Progress that inspired them. Grayson Perry follows one Briton's climb through the class system by the taste he picks up on the way. His first solo show in Mexico.
Look for
The Adoration of the Cage Fighters
Look for baby Tim grabbing his mother's smartphone, then find him again on the stairs as a four-year-old, facing another evening alone in front of a screen.
The Agony in the Car Park
On a hill outside Sunderland a shipyard crane stands in for the cross, while Tim, in grammar-school uniform, blocks his ears as his club-singer stepfather holds the centre.
Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close
Tim and his girlfriend walk out through a rainbow, posed like Masaccio's Adam and Eve, while Jamie Oliver, Perry's 'god of social mobility', looks down on them.
The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal
Find the iPad headline 'Rakewell sells to Virgin for £270m' and the organic vegetables wrapped in The Guardian, beside a convex mirror borrowed from van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait.
The Upper Class at Bay
Tim and his wife stroll like Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews while the dogs of tax, upkeep and fuel bills hunt down an old stag in a tattered tweed hide.
Good for
- Going Solo
- Nerding Out
With kids
The last tapestry shows Tim's bloody fatal car crash, and the Arts Council's education pack flags adult themes across the series.
Also at Museo Franz Mayer
On now nearby
Nearby
Image credits
9
- La vanidad de las pequeñas diferencias. Grayson PerryCourtesy of Museo Franz Mayer
- Alexandre Estrela. RedSkyFalls: RéplicaCourtesy of Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC)
- El Códice de AzcatitlanCourtesy of Museo Nacional de Antropología
- Julian Rosefeldt. ManifestoCourtesy of Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC)
- Museo Franz MayerGAED / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Museo del Palacio de Bellas ArtesXavier Quetzalcoatl Contreras Castillo / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Museo KaluzYmblanter / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Museo Memoria y ToleranciaMuseo Memoria y Tolerancia / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Museo Mural Diego RiveraJosé Luiz / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0