"David Shrigley's satirical, cartoon-like drawings are deliberately dysfunctional, dealing with the everyday doubts and fears of the human condition." BecksFutures award, 2000

David Shrigley's drawings are funny ha-ha and funny peculiar. They follow a long history of surreal cartooning from artists like Edward Lear and James Thurber to Spike Milligan, Roz Chast and Gary Larson. But his deliberately crude style often evokes more humble surroundings, back at school amongst the visual puns and wild scribblings on the inside covers of exercise books, or on the partitions between the booths in the dole office. They exist in a fantastic universe inspired by everyday boredom.

Shrigley studied at Glasgow School of Art and after college, began drawing a weekly cartoon for a Glasgow newspaper. With a simple toolkit of pen, pencil and paper he manages to be silly, charming and poignant in equal measure. This is the stuff of minor domestic tragedies and impossible heroes. His sparce images and accompanying texts offer match-box morality, warning us of the perils and paradoxes of being human, like advice from someone beyond help. "...For every moment of pleasure, for every morsel you have eaten, there is a bill in a brown envelope which must be xxxxx paid. If you cannot pay the price you should order something cheap like soup (£1.20 inc. bread)" Shrigley

"This artist takes on everything: memory and forgetting, love and hate, murder and preservation, god and godlessness." Will Self, 1998

Shrigley's work is even reminiscent of classics like Kafka's Metamorphosis or Samuel Beckett's Endgame, where the fantastical elements are less significant than the mundane and the focus is on the universal absurdity of everyday rituals and relationships.He has sympathy for anyone struggling with the complexities and contraditions of modern life where comedy and tragedy are just different takes on the same event.

Shrigley's awkward hand-drawn figures and messy scribbles, full of crossings-out are refreshing in an age where digital retouching and word-processing enable us to hide our imperfections and erase all mistakes. It is precisely the visible faults which make his work so appealing. Neatness is beside the point. Scale and perspective are irrelevant. His work is for everyone whose drawings always went wrong or whose sums never added up.

He highlights the nonsensical aspects of the human condition, particularly when he unmasks our attempts at making order out of chaos, with endless lists and rules:

His work conveys the arbitrary nature of ordinary events which seem to make us the victim of fate. Rather than make art which helps us transend the reality of daily life, his work tries to shake us from the suspended state which helps us forget that reality. As he has said himself "...I'm more interested in the ridiculous than in the sublime."

As well as his many books of collected drawings, Shrigley has made work in public spaces which he documents photographically and more recently, he has also been making sculptural pieces.

You can see more work here, from a recent exhibition at the Galleri Nicolai Wallner in Denmark and also at the twunt Web site, which contains information about all his work.

 

(right) David Shrigley , from 'Blank Page and Other Pages', published 1998 (3)

*Drawings Done Whilst on Phone to Idiot (1996 - The Armpit Press, Scotland) ERR (1996 - Book Works, London) Blank Page and Other Pages (1998 - The Modern Institute, Glasgow) Why We Got the Sack from the Museum (1998 - Redstone Press, London) The Beast is Near (1999 - Redstone Press, London)

(left) David Shrigley , from 'Blank Page and Other Pages', published 1998 (4)