Grayson Perry has been announced as the winner of the 2020 Erasmus Prize, an award under the patronage of the King of the Netherlands since 1958. He will receive the €150,000 cash prize and adornments designed by Bruno Ninaber van Eyben during an official ceremony in November 2020. Named after the Dutch humanist, the prize is awarded annually to individuals or institutions that have made significant contributions to fields of humanities, social sciences and the arts in Europe and beyond, with a commitment to ‘tolerance, cultural pluriformity and undogmatic critical thinking’. Previous winners have included Charlie Chaplin, Henry Moore, Ingmar Bergman and Claude Levi-Strauss.
During the prize announcement at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, London, Perry said: “I’m overwhelmed and honoured and humbled when I see the previous roster of winners – the great and the good of the world of culture. It feels like validation of something that has crept up on me over the years, which is that my career is making difficult ideas accessible, and making the highbrow world that I operate in intelligible for the guy on the sofa.”
Perry was selected by the Board of the Erasmus Prize Foundation, under this year’s theme of ‘the power of images in the digital era’. One of the most popular contemporary artists in the UK, the Turner-Prize winner and self-dubbed ‘tranny potter’ has over the past 20 years created a diverse body of work that takes inspiration in British folklore and traditional craftsmanship, challenging ideas of good taste and other cultural norms. His work, which ranges from tapestries to ceramic urns and dresses, has been shown widely in the UK and internationally, including at London’s Serpentine Galleries, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and the Stedelijk, Amsterdam, where he received his first institutional solo in 2002. Perry is also a broadcaster, producing and appearing in numerous cultural documentaries and TV shows including the Bafta-winning series All In the Best Possible Taste (2013), documenting the making of his monumental tapestries exploring the notion of taste in Britain, and Who Are You? (2014), discussing identity. All Man, a series delving into definitions of masculinities, was broadcast in 2016 and led to the publication of a book, The Descent of Man. His latest series, Grayson Perry’s Big American Road Trip, will be aired on Channel 4 in 2020.
27 February 2020
