David Shrigley

From Leicester to Glasgow

Shrigley was born in Macclesfield in 1968 and went to school in Oadby, near Leicester. After a foundation course in art and design at Leicester Polytechnic he studied Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 1991, and he stayed in Glasgow for the best part of three decades before moving to Brighton and Devon in 2015. Through the 1990s he built his reputation largely on paper, making ink drawings and publishing small books of them himself.

The drawing and the caption

His drawings pair an image made with a quick, unpolished line with a few handwritten words. The results read like overheard remarks, instructions nobody asked for or lists that go slightly wrong, and they often take the viewpoint of an alien, a monster or an anxious narrator talking to himself. His London gallery, Stephen Friedman, described the humour as deadpan, and the texts as chance utterances; the commissioning statement for his Fourth Plinth sculpture placed the work in the British tradition of satire. The crude look is deliberate. Critics have tended to read the tension between that unpolished technique and the anxiety, absurdity and dark comedy the drawings carry as the core of the work, and it explains how the same drawing can be very funny and faintly bleak at once.

Beyond the page

Drawing stays at the centre, but Shrigley has taken its voice into almost every format. His animated short Who I Am and What I Want, co-directed with Chris Shepherd, won a Tiger Award for Short Film at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2006. Pass the Spoon, an opera with music by David Fennessy and words and costumes by Shrigley, premiered at Tramway in Glasgow in 2011, was staged at the Southbank Centre in London in 2012 and was revived by Opera North in 2025. He has also made sculpture, painting and photography, worked on collaborative music projects, and kept publishing books, deliberately reaching audiences outside the gallery.

The Hayward Gallery's survey Brain Activity in 2012, which travelled to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, brought the range of this work together, and he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize the following year.

Really Good

In 2016 Shrigley's Really Good became the eleventh commission for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. The bronze hand gives a thumbs-up, cast with the same dark patina as the square's other statues, but the thumb is absurdly long. Shrigley's stated hope was that the gesture might become a self-fulfilling prophecy, nudging things usually agreed to be bad, such as the economy, the weather and society, towards a more positive consensus. The Mayor's office presented it as an open question: what, exactly, is really good, where is it, and who says so? The sculpture divided critics as sharply as it delighted crowds.

Recent projects

Shrigley's public commissions and later projects keep testing how far a joke can travel. Memorial, a five-metre granite slab carved like a war memorial, was installed in Central Park, New York, in 2016 for Public Art Fund. It is engraved instead with a shopping list, which he compiled from lists supplied by American friends, editing out anything too fancy so that only ordinary items remained. For Pulped Fiction in 2023 he pulped thousands of copies of a bestselling thriller and used the paper to print George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. In 2024 he unveiled The Mantis Muse, a three-metre praying mantis with an animatronic head, at his former school in Oadby, to make the case for art in schools.