David Shrigley, a British artist who has gained significant traction in recent years.
David Shrigley’s fame has undoubtedly grown in recent years, and the deadpan humour which infiltrates his witty, pithy pieces has firmly established him as an important contemporary artist willing to push the boundaries and definitions of fine art.
Shrigley’s popularity is reflected in the prices his pieces fetch; his work is especially sought-after in the United Kingdom, and his prints account for nearly 90% of his work sold at auction. They tend to reach between £1,000 and £5,000, though they regularly exceed their estimates, and many have fetched higher prices.
Despite being a successful artist, David Shrigley is a relatively conventional man, having once stated that everyone he knows in the arts is “pretty functional.” Nevertheless, he is thoughtful and thought-provoking, and it is interesting to consider some facets of his life when looking at his art. Below are seven things you might not have known about David Shrigley.
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He Used To Think Printing Was “Boring”
David Shrigley was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, but between 1988 and 1991, he studied Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art. Amusingly, the artist said recently that he had looked down on the printing department at art school, and he’d secretly “considered the printmakers to be losers who weren’t good enough to be in the ‘cool’ departments.”
His “ill-informed prejudice subsided about a decade later” after he made his first etchings. He now views printmaking as a “direct” and “vibrant medium”, and prints currently account for the majority of his work sold at auction
His Most Expensive Print Sold For £18,000
My Rampage Is Over is a screenprint from 2019 depicting a dejected, tired-looking blue elephant with the caption: “I must rest, my rampage is over.” It accounts for eight out of ten of David Shrigley’s most expensive prints sold at auction, with the most expensive of those being sold by Phillips in June 2023 for £18,000. The print is exemplary of Shrigley’s crude, almost cartoonlike style and thoughtful accompanying text.
My Rampage Is Over sold by Phillip’s in 2019
He Received A 2:2 Degree
David Shrigley’s time at the Glasgow School of Art culminated in his final degree show, which he believed was “brilliant.” His final 2:2 degree, however, suggested otherwise, with the artist wryly commenting the people marking him “didn’t appreciate my genius.”
This defiant approach to authority and willingness to make light of serious situations is reflected in many of David Shrigley’s prints, including Untitled (I Am Listening), in which a hare’s huge ears take centre stage, adorned with the quote: “I am listening, but you don’t make any sense.”
He Exhibited On The Fourth Plinth
In 2016, Shrigley exhibited Really Good on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth. Really Good is an enormous sculpture of a human hand making a thumbs-up gesture, with the twist that the thumb is actually absurdly elongated. In the artist’s words, the idea was that the piece would be “a self-fulfilling prophecy about London, whereby if I say it’s really good, then it’ll become really, um, good.”
It’s impossible to fault Shrigley’s optimism and hope that things can be improved; his belief that laughter and kindness can help make the world a better place is reflected in prints such as Be Kind To Everyone and Live Each Day As If It Were Your First. The titles say it all, and the almost-naïve hope is perhaps one of the reasons he is such a popular artist in today’s climate.
Really Good on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth
He’s Interested In Language
One of Shrigley’s latest projects is called Pulped Fiction. The artist was inspired by reading about a charity bookshop in Swansea which made headline news after it displayed several hundred copies of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown in its window, alongside a sign asking that no more copies be donated. David Shrigley’s response was to produce a limited run of George Orwell’s canonical dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, from the pulped remains of unwanted copies of Dan Brown’s book.
This reflects Shigley’s enduring fascination in “the way language and images work together.” Almost all his prints involve text at some point, and in pieces such as Untitled (A Gap In the Clouds), the words are crucial to the understanding of the artwork.
His Work Is Intuitive And Instinctive
David Shrigley once said his work comes about through an “intuitive, unconscious, and slightly random” process. This gives it an immediacy and a physicality which is lacking in other more conceptual contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, and it is perhaps one of the reasons Shrigley’s pieces are so instantly engaging.
A childish naïveté runs throughout David Shrigley’s work, and it is precisely this which makes it so accessible; the artist once said “I went from being the best artist in my class when I was six to being the worst at art when I was at art school – the worst at drawing, I should say.” This realisation led him back to drawing just as he had when he was “a little kid,” and it has resulted in some of his most popular work, including My Rampage Is Over and Live Each Day As If It Were Your First.
He Wanted To Be An Artist From A Young Age
Shrigley has said he drew from a young age, and once he realised he wasn’t going to be “a footballer or an astronaut,” he decided he would pursue art, though he didn’t know at the time that it was a viable career option. After art school, he continued honing his personal style, and he did a variety of jobs to make money in the meantime, including working in a gallery and being an extra in movies (he even briefly appeared in some scenes from Trainspotting).
As the artist himself has said: “suddenly, I became an inadvertent commercial success and famous artist, but it really was very much by accident, because I was just happy doing it.”
