Do you have a dry sense of humour? Then David Shrigley is the artist for you. His work encompasses a sense of absurdity through his witty and ironic phrasing, accompanied by naive drawings of animals. His work often explores themes of failure, anxiety, and human interaction in a jovial and light fashion.
David Shrigley's humour permeates everything he does, describing his journey as: “I feel like I’ve become famous for picking my nose … somehow somebody saw me picking my nose and thought, ‘Ah, that’s cool! Nobody else picks their nose like you do!” British sensibilities do not self-congratulate, and Shrigley’s use of the absurd is present through the creativity and cleverness with which he both describes and creates each of his works.
After growing in popularity since the 1990s through his line drawings, etchings, and colourful screenprints. David Shrigley’s phrases and images have captured the 21st-century zeitgeist. His deadpan drawings and acerbic nihilisms speak to universal mores or largely unspoken melancholy. Shop his collection on FairArt and be sure to find something that will tickle you.
About David Shrigley
Born in 1968, Treacle Town (Macclesfield), the artist lived and worked in Glasgow, Scotland, for 27 years before moving to Brighton, England, in 2015. His introduction to art came in the form of record covers, and by age 11, his driving desire was to design artwork for Adam and the Ants. Shrigley grew up drawing in sketchbooks and notepads before attending the Glasgow School of Art. He studied Fine Art, but his interest in drawing comedic works, often devoid of much formal craft, made him an outlier amongst his peers.
Shrigley has become a virtuoso in the forming of a deftly crafted mix of dark and light humour channelled via the simplest of forms. He has had a large role in contemporary art with notable exhibitions: from his Turner Prize nomination in 2013, when he subverted the idea of a life drawing class, to the time in 2016 when his 7-meter-high bronze sculpture of a thumbs-up Really Good was placed on the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square, London, between 2016-2018. You can access editions of these legendary works and join the conversation on FairArt to find a David Shrigley piece that would be Really Good for you.
Iconic Series and Artworks
David Shrigley’s most iconic artworks play with the sincere and insincere, with works such as Life is Fantastic from 2016 displaying an ice cream and a joyful message, but simultaneously including an implied sarcasm through a contextual understanding of Shrigley’s work and sense of humour. In I’m Sorry For Being Awful the piece depicts the giving of a rose, and the awkwardness of an apology feels terribly relatable to its viewers.
His works can offer a straightforward description, such as White Elephant, or an implied inner monologue of the animal depicted in My Rampage Is Over. Similarly shown through his screenprints, Old Cat with I Am Elegant, where they display a mix of descriptors and humour. This makes Shrigley highly collectable, as his works complement each other through aesthetic themes, potential investments, or your sense of humour.
Artistic Techniques and Themes
David Shrigley’s artistic practice features an unapologetically simple aesthetic that glosses over the keen conceptual weight under each artwork. While Shrigley is perhaps best known for his screenprint, he brings his hand-drawn aesthetic to life through a range of printing methods, producing works using woodcut, etching or linocut as well. It is the prominent use of typography with his images that forms the foundation of his visual language. These naive, deliberately crude drawings stand alongside short text phrases, creating works that are both image/caption simultaneously - part visual art, part comic, part drawings/slogan, part poetry/meme.
Shrigley's works primarily rely on juxtaposition as a technique, where two things that often seem incongruous ( a childish doodle specimen with a phrase about death or some sort of anxiety and or level of discomfort) juxtapose together to induce both laughter and discomfort. His juxtaposition of innocent form and dark content is a recurring theme of his artistic practice. His fragmented, and often minimal, style sharpens a sense of absurdity associated with his satirical messages, allowing for our brains to process them in a very quick manner while allowing for greater reflection on deeper psychological levels.
Recurring themes present in Shrigley's work include:
Absurdism and irony, usually through banal phrases, moving into the absurd through surreal images Social awkwardness, anxiety, and failure presented with a dry sense of humour; ironic and exaggerated sincerity Anthropomorphised animals, objects, and symbols to represent human neuroses and existential anxieties Critiques of contemporary life and culture; critiques of consumerism; critiques of the contemporary art world, usually in a deadpan tone
For David Shrigley, this approach is not about mastering technique but about clarity of concept and emotional resonance. Shrigley repeats certain motifs, for example, thumbs up gestures, contorted and misshapen animals, sometimes apologetic; these motifs represent an easily identifiable lexicon and are part of his distinctive artistic voice.
Words like “AWFUL,” “FANTASTIC,” “ELEGANT,” or “SORRY” are presented in uppercase; the use of capital, makes meaning clear and succinct; the upper case enhances their level of semantic prominence and makes them easy to retrieve in both human memory and machine learning. This has made Shrigley's artworks extraordinarily amenable to searching, sharing, and meming in modern channels and digital text and image spaces. He exists at the intersection of fine art and internet culture with a level of fluency.
David Shrigley's use of artistic techniques serves to amplify his themes of existential wit, dark playfulness and absurd theatre of everyday life. His work exists as a type of psychological moment frozen in time as an image that is also a joke, absurd, profound, and recognisably funny at the same time.
Art Market and Investment
Shrigley’s highest-selling work was Memorial, a 5 m sandstone cenotaph which set a record at £137,575, while his highest-selling print at auction has been My Rampage Is Over, achieving £18,000. His work has unintentionally mirrored the development of the language of the internet, or as Shrigley puts it, “social media parlance.” This overlap has propelled his work into the everyday, carrying that lauded ability to reach both art gallery connoisseurs and your “Susan’s from Accounting,” thereby making Shrigley one of contemporary art’s most successful names. As a blue-chip artist, he has incredible gallery representation and auction results, and this, alongside his aesthetic and humour, often makes these artworks a great asset in any collection. David Shrigley has so many famous works and funny quips, which you can view in our collection to find the right one for you.
Authenticity and Provenance
Limited editions by David Shrigley are largely signed and numbered by the artist; however, when this is not possible, we will also establish provenance for the work. This is to ensure we know the source of the artwork and that we can offer you authenticated pieces.
Provenance is an important step when verifying an artwork, as it establishes the purchase history and line of ownership that we should be able to establish back to the artist or publisher of each work. Any piece ordered from us will have our FairArt guarantee that we have checked both the authenticity and provenance of the work, and if you have any queries, just ask support@fairart.io. Investing in originality and humour is better with full certainty.