“It’s about time a transvestite potter from Essex won the Turner,” declared Grayson Perry as he accepted Britain’s leading contemporary art award in 2003, in a frilly purple Little Bo Peep outfit, dressed as his feminine alter-ego character “Claire.”

Over a decade later, in December last year, the sharp-tongued cultural critic and acclaimed British artist arrived in Sydney with a suitcase full of only Claire’s skimpiest outfits to ward off the summer heat—the latter of which he refers to as the “enemy of drag.” Perry was visiting the city to open his own blockbuster retrospective at Sydney’s Musem of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), entitled “Grayson Perry: My Pretty Little Art Career.” Curated by MCA chief curator Rachel Kent, the exhibition is the first for the artist in the Southern Hemisphere. 

“My Pretty Little Art Career” reveals Perry’s oeuvre to be even more impressive than his gender-bending wardrobe. An array of ceramics, sculptures, drawings, prints and tapestries was spread across an entire floor of the museum. All of which proved to be rich in virtuoso detail, swimming with social critique and carrying the sardonic humor that is characteristic of the artist’s creative fingerprint.

Among the most striking of these pieces is a series of six enormous tapestries called “The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal” (2012), which follows the life journey of a protagonist named Tim Rakewell—inspired by the eponymous character in English artist William Hogarth’s painting series “A Rake’s Progress” (1732–33)—beginning from his upbringing in a working class family to climbing the social ladder to his eventual death inside a Ferrari. The modern-day tragedy of class mobility is depicted using the historical, stately and rich medium of tapestry. Each two-by-four-meter piece, made up of wool, silk, cotton, acrylic and polyester, are woven with extreme detail and executed in loud colors through the use of machines. Upon close inspection, one observes that a portrait of the artist himself is featured in each tapestry. Replete with corporate brands—of cigarettes and fast-food chains, and from advertisements, fashion and tabloid magazines—the world’s commercialization invades each picture, and moments in Tim Rakewell’s life, and the pursuit of these goods and lifestyle inevitably causes the protagonist’s tragic demise. In an interview with UK’s Channel Four, Perry explained: “I am interested in the politics of consumerism and the history of popular design, but for this project I focus on the emotional investment we make in the things we choose to live with, wear, eat, read or drive.”

“Grayson Perry: My Pretty Little Art Career” is on view at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, until May 1, 2016.