Liesbeth Van Lancker

Tijdens mijn bezoek aan de Whitechapel Art Gallery in Londen zag ik het werk Print for a Politician van Grayson Perry hangen. Het werk trok onmiddellijk mijn aandacht. De print is een langwerpig werk van 70 op 252 cm. Op de drie vellen Rives Velin wordt een beeld weergegeven van stereotype figuren uit onze maatschappij.

“People have sub-personalities and they play them out, a mature person is someone who can negotiate and allow sub-personalities to have their say even when we may find some of the voices unattractive. There’s parts of all of ourselves we don’t like. Print for a Politician tries to capture that.

“I was thinking of all the bickering that’s been going on in the world and what fun it would be to label everybody socially. I made a long list of all the different groups I could think of off the top of my head and scattered them randomly on the surface. There are minimalists, chauvinist pigs, elitists, parents, fat people, townies, locals, the old, Sunnis, Shias, fantasists, working class, thick people, satanists. Everything. It shows that we can live with this difference.

“I started at the top lefthand corner and worked my way to the bottom righthand corner a month later. It took a long time to draw it. I just made it up as I went along really. The way I have depicted every group is kind of random. I wanted people to look at it and feel that they associated themselves with at least some of the people and think ‘in the end, we are all just as bad as each other’. (Grayson Perry in The Guardian maart 2006)