David Shrigley

Subversive, satirical and fiendishly clever, the British artist David Shrigley’s works tap into the snappy, punchy spirit of contemporary visual culture, gaining him an audience far beyond the commercial art world. Finding humour in the mundane, his subjects are often simple - a cat or an alarm clock - combined with off-kilter fragments of text from overheard conversations or Freudian slips. “I’m very inspired by the Dada era and by artists like Andy Warhol,” he says. “Dada is comedy, it’s anarchy, and it’s funny a lot of the time.”

Born in 1968 in Macclesfield, UK, Shrigley moved to Glasgow to study Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art after completing a foundation course in art and design at Leicester Polytechnic in 1987. Living and working in Brighton today, his writing projects and collaborations with musicians began early in his career and continue to be integral to his practice. In 2003, he directed a music video for the British band Blur and, in 2007, made an album entitled ‘Worried Noodles’, collaborating with eclectic leftfield bands to interpret his words as lyrics.