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By my estimation, the best cross-dressing artist of all time. Grayson's feminine self, Claire, is a show all by herself.
He/she is immensely popular in the UK. When Grayson is designing the sexually explicit pottery he's famous for, and the immensely colorful satirical tapestries, he is, I believe the male self. But this could be wrong, it might be Claire doing all the hard work. That would be just like a man.
Somehow he has managed to bring "obscene sadomasochistic sex scenes” to pottery, upsetting a few folk.
Young Perry liked to dress in women's clothes and in his teens realized that he was a transvestite. That was after he tied himself up in his pyjamas at the age of seven and by accident discovered the joy of sex. Really.
In working class Essex all this did not go down well. When he started going out in public as a woman at 15, his stepmother threw him out. He moved in with his real mom, but then his stepfather threw him out. Damn.
Penniless and living in squats in London, Perry shared a place with Boy George for a while. Theirs was a highly competitive relationship centered on who could throw together the most outrageous outfit.
But thank god, Freud, or whoever, for psychoanalysis: therapy “became the most influential factor in my art over the last 15 years. It gave me clarity. I always describe it as someone tidying up my tool shed so that I had everything easily to hand and wasn’t fumbling in the dark any more.”
There is a brilliant Channel 4 documentary, All in the Best Possible Taste with Grayson Perry, that catches Grayson hanging about in succession with working class, middle class, and upper class Brits. It's hilarious, touching, and just plain clever.
Source
Nick Clark, Grayson Perry's Walthamstow Tapestry acquired by prestigious Chinese gallery, The Independent 15 May 2014.
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Grayson Perry
Sir Grayson Perry CBE RA Hon FRIBA (born 24 March 1960) is an English contemporary artist, writer and broadcaster. He is known for his ceramic vases, tapestries, and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles".
Perry's vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colours, depicting subjects at odds with their attractive appearance. There is a strong autobiographical element in his work, in which images of Perry as "Claire", his female alter-ego, and "Alan Measles", his childhood teddy bear, often appear. He has made a number of documentary television programmes and has curated exhibitions. He has published two autobiographies, Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (2007) and The Descent of Man (2016), written and illustrated a graphic novel, Cycle of Violence (2012), written a book about art, Playing to the Gallery (2014), and published his illustrated Sketchbooks (2016). Various books describing his work have been published. In 2013 he delivered the BBC Reith Lectures.
Perry has had solo exhibitions at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan. His work is held in the permanent collections of
the British Council and Arts Council, Crafts Council, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Tate and Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Perry was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003. He was interviewed about the win and resulting press in Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World. In 2008 he was ranked number 32 in The Daily Telegraph's list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". In 2012, Perry was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork—the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover—to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life.
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