David Shrigley

David Shrigley is a British artist known for his distinctive and humorous take on contemporary art. His drawings, paintings, animations and sculptures satirise the everyday, blurring the line between the absurd and the profound and capturing the quirks of human behaviour with wit and irony.

David Shrigley was born in 1968 in Macclesfield, England, and raised in Oadby, Leicestershire. Shrigley studied environmental art at the Glasgow School of Art between 1988 and 1991. His works are widely recognised for their simplicity and directness in aesthetic, delivered in a tough-in-cheek approach. His drawings, often accompanied by handwritten text, tackle a range of themes from the mundane to the existential. These works have made him a beloved figure in the contemporary art world, resonating with audiences for their relatability and dark humour.

Beyond drawings and paintings, Shrigley has created sculptures, installations and commissions for public spaces. Between September 2016 and March 2018, Shrigley’s sculpture Really Good (2016) was installed in London’s Trafalgar Square as part of the fourth plinth commission programme. Standing at seven meters high, the bronze sculpture is a monumental hand in an impossibly stretched thumbs-up gesture. In a time of political and economic uncertainty in the United Kingdom, the sculpture could be read at once a call for optimism and a sarcastic poke at reality. This piece, like much of his work, invites viewers to reconsider everyday objects through a lens of absurdity.

David Shrigley has exhibited widely across the United Kingdom, in Denmark, Sweden, Australia, the United States and more. His works can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. David Shrigley now lives and works in Brighton.