David Shrigley: the Quirky Genius of Art and Absurdity
The Story
David Shrigley is a British artist known for his dry humor, bright colors, whimsical characters, and ironic captions that turn everyday absurdity into deadpan commentary.
Born in Macclesfield in 1968 and now based in Brighton, he works across drawing, sculpture, large scale installation, animation, painting, photography, and music.
His 2022 exhibition Mainly Multiples, Some Paintings & Other Stuff Too opened at the Hang Up Gallery in Hoxton, London, running from November 18, 2022 through January 27, 2023.
The show gathered more than 30 works, including limited edition prints, color and monochrome originals, ceramics, and posters priced from 295 pounds, among them the 2017 linocut I'm Special in an edition of 100.
The gallery had dealt his work for nearly a decade and framed the exhibition as its first comprehensive survey of the artist.
His wider reputation rests on earlier milestones including a Turner Prize nomination in 2013 and a Fourth Plinth commission in Trafalgar Square, cementing him as one of Britain's most recognizable contemporary artists.
Born in Macclesfield in 1968 and now based in Brighton, he works across drawing, sculpture, large scale installation, animation, painting, photography, and music.
His 2022 exhibition Mainly Multiples, Some Paintings & Other Stuff Too opened at the Hang Up Gallery in Hoxton, London, running from November 18, 2022 through January 27, 2023.
The show gathered more than 30 works, including limited edition prints, color and monochrome originals, ceramics, and posters priced from 295 pounds, among them the 2017 linocut I'm Special in an edition of 100.
The gallery had dealt his work for nearly a decade and framed the exhibition as its first comprehensive survey of the artist.
His wider reputation rests on earlier milestones including a Turner Prize nomination in 2013 and a Fourth Plinth commission in Trafalgar Square, cementing him as one of Britain's most recognizable contemporary artists.
Why It Matters
The joke has scaled. The £295 Hoxton prints were the cheap end of a practice now filling museums: Kunsthal Rotterdam showed fifty new drawings as What the Hell Was I Thinking? from December 13, 2025 to May 3, 2026, and the 2023 stunt of pulping 6,000 copies of The Da Vinci Code into 1,250 editions of 1984 at £495, per the BBC, sold from the Swansea Oxfam that had begged donors to stop. The catch is volume: an artist on every gift shop mug tests how much scarcity his prints can claim. His first UK public gallery solo since 2012 comes when Dulwich Picture Gallery hangs new Shrigleys beside Rembrandt from May 25 to September 5, 2027, per Time Out.
Go Deeper
Read the original reporting at FAD Magazine.
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