Grayson Perry: Smash Hits review – English self-mockery without insight or depth

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
This is a show stuffed with clutter and haunted by Perry’s teddy bear, with works that are too flip to land any satirical punches

Just once in his retrospective at the Royal Scottish Academy, Grayson Perry seems to speak from the heart. In his nearly three-metre-long woodcut print Reclining Artist, he stretches out nude on the sofa, with long fingernails against a slender thigh, his penis dangling over saggy balls, and plump female breasts.

It is a synthesis of who he is and who he dreams of being: “a fantasy version of myself, neither fully male nor fully female”, as he notes in the caption. Yet if it is a fantasy, this 2017 vision is also the most authentic work of art in this entire assembly of Perry’s “Smash Hits”. Here he is, he can be no other. He looks you dead in the eye, serious and for once not breaking out into the blokey laugh that’s familiar to watchers of his TV shows.

Grayson Perry: Smash Hits is at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, until 12 November

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