Map Of Nowhere (purple)
Map Of Nowhere (purple)
Signed Print
Grayson Perry
Price data unavailable
AAGR (5 years) This estimate blends recent public auction records with our own private sale data and network demand.
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Medium: Etching
Edition size: 15
Year: 2008
Size: H 150cm x W 114cm
Signed: Yes
Format: Signed Print
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Meaning & Analysis
This signed etching from 2008 is a limited edition of 15 from Grayson Perry’s Map collection. The vertical etching shows a detailed and rich purple map, dominated by the artist’s own head which trumps over the rest of the depiction.
This map draws from a vast historical tradition of map-making and cartography. Using various art-historical references within most of his works, Perry admitted to having taken inspiration from 16th-century Dutch maps of this series of works. However, the reference here is even more specific, insofar as the mapping of the depiction onto the artist’s own body takes from a religious Christian tradition of mapping the world onto the body of Christ. Taking as his own departure point the Ebstorf Map, a German medieval Mappa Mundi destroyed to the Hanover bombing of 1943, Perry focuses his depiction on portraying his “internal states”. Making use of a variety of symbols, the Map intriguingly draws the viewer into a complex self-portrait of the artist. Using words such as “doubt”, “hubris” and “post-ironic sincerity”, the artist hints at his contradictions and lays himself bare to the viewer with sincerity, irony and originality.
Rather than a real topography, Map Of Nowhere represents a portrayal of Perry’s identity in all of its polarising and competing aspects, a trope the artist used time and time again in pieces like Map of An Englishman.
The highest value realised for a work by Grayson Perry was in October 2017, when I Want To Be An Artist fetched £632,750 at Christie's, London. The values achieved for Perry's work at auction regularly land in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.
