David Shrigley

David Shrigley (b. 1968) is one of the world’s favorite artists – his mordant wit and lightning brush sum up politics, philosophy, and ethics in broad and honest strokes. In a wry look at “extra virgin,” Shrigley creates an image that conjures up youth and beauty, along with a hint of calamity. Shrigley lives and works in Brighton, England. 

The work of David Shrigley lends itself to application in more contexts than are usual for the lofty domain of art. And he’s made it that way purposefully, tackling the coffee mug, tea towel, salt and pepper shaker, and really, any number of surfaces and artefacts with his messages, if not to say, propaganda. Shrigley is a missionary for the true and the good, for animals, for plant life, for justice. He’s taken the authoritarian “aesthetics of administration,” out of Conceptualism, and picked up the writing of Charles Schultz, rather than Wittgenstein. At the same time, his philosophical references come from sources high and low, and one of the most endearing aspects of Shrigley’s work is his ready quotations of ancient truths, mixed in with an astute and up-to-date knowledge of contemporary culture, from music to advertising slogans. For Agricola Due Leoni, the lady wading out to sea at first caught curator Cornelia off-guard, as a latter-day Ophelia hardly seemed a sales gambit, But then Giuseppe working with Trotskyite olive pickers was no less of a conundrum, and so the dismantling of a sales ploy and depiction of a young maiden off to drown herself or take a swim, seemed just as valid an image for someone determined not to be a shill of the marketplace. With thanks, Due Leoni accepted the drawings and their rendering on the edition.