Jeremy Deller is known for challenging art-world conventions and pioneering new collaborative artforms made with individuals and social groups ranging from Manic Street Preachers fans to allotment gardeners in Münster and the nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow. He has organised city parades in San Sebastián and Manchester, presented an epic re-enactment of one of the most vicious confrontations of the 1980s coal miners’ strike, staged a competition to design a bat house and toured America with a wrecked car taken from the site of a Baghdad bomb attack. Now Deller, who won the Turner Prize in 2004 and was appointed a Tate trustee in 2007, has been commissioned by the National Gallery to round off its bicentenary celebrations in July 2025 with a public performance entitled The Triumph of Art.
What are you planning for The Triumph of Art?
I’m still in the research phase but it’s going to be a procession through the streets of central London ending up with a birthday party for the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. It’s a big fête-/bacchanal-type event with performance of some description and with live music in the square. It will be free entry—something that everyone can go to.
You are working with four UK-wide partners: The Box in Plymouth; Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee; Mostyn in Llandudno and The Playhouse in Derry. What is their involvement?
Because it’s the National Galley I’ve been sent off all around Britain to work with people and organisations to bring in things from outside of London. Each town has a curator, working on my behalf, who is an expert in their local area. They’re opening doors, helping me to find people and to work on themes.
Your National Gallery commission is called The Triumph of Art, but knowing your track record, I assume this means art in the widest sense?
I’m interested in pushing the envelope of what is acceptable to be called art, who makes it and what are its limits, if there are any. What exists on the fringes is always interesting to me. Art is an event and it’s not just painting, so it will be a very broad mix of different kinds of people. We will be working with all ages and, very importantly, it will be fun as well. Of course, it is about the National Gallery, but it’s also about Trafalgar Square, which has this incredible history in terms of what has happened in it, so that will be referenced as well.
You trained as an art historian and you have cited the bacchanals, unruly gods and Dionysian revels in the National Gallery’s paintings as an inspiration, as well as British folklore and rave culture.
Yes, we are taking inspiration from those paintings and those mythologies because these stories are timeless. So, we’re looking at mythologies and at celebrations and bad behaviour; for me, all that’s really important.
So, is The Triumph of Art about merging the so-called high art of the National Gallery with more popular forms of culture?
I think there’s a great connection between those two things. I’m part of the art establishment, I was at the Courtauld [Institute] and an artist trustee of the Tate. I know the museum world very well, I like it a lot and I feel very much at home within it. But I also understand that that’s just one aspect of what the art world is and what creativity is. Artists take so much from broader culture, from folk art and the vernacular, and it’s so inspiring for them to see this work. I’ve always taken inspiration from events like this and it’s also natural for me. And anyway, a lot of folk customs and events aren’t really too far away from the Greek gods. It’s all just a human impulse of some kind of enjoyment: whether druids or bacchanals, it’s all just people having a party in a forest.
What does the National Gallery mean to you?
I remember going with my dad when I was around ten. I grew up in London and I wasn’t a sporty kid, and I used to go to museums quite a bit with him: the Imperial War Museum, the Horniman and then I graduated to the National Gallery. I have an early memory of being really blown away by a painting of the Lady Jane Grey execution [Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833)]; that painting had a really big effect on me. I think it was partly the scale; it seemed life-sized to a small child. But it was also just walking through the rooms, and the general atmosphere, that was as striking as individual works.
You studied the Baroque at the Courtauld Institute. What was it about that period that appealed?
The drama and the breaking down of genres. The order and tranquillity of the Renaissance was destroyed by the Baroque—or I felt that it was. It was just much more exciting and visceral. We’d go to the National Gallery a lot—I was taught by the Baroque art historian Jennifer Fletcher—and we’d stand in front of a painting for sometimes nearly an hour while she talked about it. I remember looking at [Caravaggio’s] The Supper at Emmaus for so long we were almost hallucinating by the end.
William Hogarth, The Shrimp Girl (around 1740-45), Deller’s favourite work in the National Gallery collection Photo: The National Gallery, London
Are there any works at the National Gallery that you return to today?
My favourite painting is actually not finished. It’s The Shrimp Girl by Hogarth. For years I thought she was wearing this very fancy hat but she’s actually got shrimps on her head, which would probably be for selling. I like the duality: you’re thinking that she’s a member of the aristocracy, a Gainsborough lady, and then you get close and you realise she’s actually a working-class woman on the streets of London selling shrimps. She’s smiling, and maybe it was her demeanour to be friendly to people—that’s how she sold her shrimps. So, it’s quite a complex painting even though it’s almost just a drawing, and I find it quite a moving image which is totally Hogarth. He was interested in working-class people.
As it celebrates its 200th birthday, what is the importance of the National Gallery today?
It’s free and it’s an inspiration to see that no idea is new. People have been thinking about the same things for hundreds of years. The fact that it’s free and open to all gives a sense of ownership; these works belong to everyone and that’s really important.