“It’s just one f***ing thing after another,” reads the scrawly text, squeezed tightly into the upper left-hand corner of the 2022 lithograph of the same name. Painted by the master of the aphorism David Shrigley, the canvas is a fever dream of vivid blobs, daubings and squiggles; the overall effect is a meltdown in bold, bright colour.
This design has now been transposed on to a handmade silk scarf available at Shrig Shop, the artist’s bricks-and-mortar outlet for his wares, which opened in 2021. Despite Shrigley’s status as a quintessentially British artist, the store is in Copenhagen. Indeed, he has long had a connection with the Danish capital — for the past 22 years his prints have been made there, with the printmaker Michael Schäfer, hence the name of his new UK exhibition, Copenhagen Prints, which starts this week at Jealous Gallery in east London.
A print from Shrigley’s new show, called Something Good Will Happen If We Wait Long Enough, 2024
“At art school I thought printmaking was really boring,” Shrigley says. Then in 1995 he was invited to take part in a group exhibition in Copenhagen. “I made some drawings that I pinned on the wall of a little gallery, and they sold for £50 each, which seemed like a huge amount of money,” he continues. “They were the first artworks I sold.” The Danes, known for their dark sense of humour, embraced the nature of Shrigley’s works, while the local gallerist Nicolai Wallner snapped him up. The two have worked together ever since, and it was Wallner who suggested he go into prints.
Shrigley has not looked back. These days he does not only prints, but a lot more too: tea towels, badges, a ceramic foot sculpture doubling as an egg cup, even a packet of Stupid Decisions stickers, all of which are stocked at Shrig Shop (again Wallner’s idea — available in the UK online at shrigshop.com). Shrigley branched out into mass production following huge sales of a poster he had designed for a museum show, of which he was entitled to only a tiny percentage of the profits. “Whereas before the merchandising people often wouldn’t let me do what I wanted, suddenly I was excited about it again because I had control.”
Shrigley’s Really Good on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square
ALAMY
It would seem everyone wants a piece of Shrigley. It was a similar scenario back in 2014 at the London restaurant Sketch, where 239 of Shrigley’s black-and-white artworks embellished the walls. The pieces were so sought-after that eventually the owner, Mourad Mouraz, and Shrigley agreed to sell them. “David had difficulty keeping up [replacing them with new pieces],” Mouraz remembers.
Shrigley, 55, and I meet in his studio in Brighton, where he works every day from 10am to 6pm — he lives nearby with his wife, Kim. The shelves are crammed with archived goods. Is he ever concerned that he might be diluting the brand with the ubiquitousness of his merchandise? “For a long time I did anything and everything with small companies who asked for a design for T-shirts, pencils or whatever,” he says of his vast portfolio, which also includes working with the Comme des Garçons designer, Rei Kawakubo, and designing a giant banana mosaic for the pool at Soho House’s Brighton outpost.
Born in Macclesfield, Shrigley attended the Glasgow School of Art aged 19, remaining in the city for 27 years. His first exhibition was in 1995 at Transmission, the artist-run contemporary gallery in Glasgow. Being shown there “was the acknowledgement of my peers, which meant a lot to me”, but the turning point was when one of his drawings was featured on the cover of Frieze Magazine later that year. “This was my overnight success, when I went from zero to hero. Since then my career has made a steady incline.”
The giant banana mosaic for the pool at Soho House in Brighton
This early success culminated in Shrigley’s nomination for the Turner prize in 2013 for Brain Activity, his solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. He was invited to share the space by the conceptual artist Jeremy Deller, who felt that “David was making work that was so odd and funny that it weirdly stretched my understanding of art.”
Of the Turner recognition, Shrigley says: “It is an odd thing for artists of my generation — it feels like you’re going to be nominated whether you like it or not, but it was still an honour.” Was he affected by the inevitable carping that followed? “You probably are wounded by any criticism you receive.” Around this time he had an epiphany. “I learnt that the only meaningful thing that is important — and the only privilege — is to be allowed to make the work.” But I don’t have to read any more reviews or worry about my status in the art world because from now on my byline for evermore will be Turner prize nominee,” he says, laughing.
His work is now held in important global collections such as the Tate, the Pompidou and MoMA. Perhaps his highest-profile piece is Really Good, a 7m-high bronze hand with an extended thumbs up, which from 2016 sat for 18 months on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. The piece was recently sold to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne for a rumoured £600,000.
From a large stack of boxes he pulls out a copy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, recently published by Shrigley in a limited-edition run of 1,250, for the Pulped Fiction project. “I read a news story about a charity shop in Swansea that put a sign in the window saying ‘You could give us another The Da Vinci Code, but we would rather have your vinyl’. I decided I wanted all those unwanted copies, because if one shop had hundreds of redundant copies, there must be thousands of others available.” Some time later, on hearing that the copyright on Nineteen Eighty-Four had recently expired, he had the brainwave of pulping the Dan Brown blockbuster and repurposing it as Orwell’s dystopian classic.
Now financially secure and able to work on his own terms, Shrigley decided to finance the project, “for six figures and then some”. He sells copies, with a special Nineteen Eighty-Four-themed signed print included, for £1,095 each, and says the project has already paid for itself. Shrigley exchanged one copy for five haircuts from a hairdresser friend.
This is all very Shrigley: less about the money, more about trading skill sets. “I’m not really interested in being paid for stuff, as it sometimes gets awkward when money is involved. A barter is nice, like when I made original prints for departing chefs at Noma [the three-Michelin-star restaurant in Copenhagen]. The owner, René Redzepi, gave me 24 dinner tickets, so I was able to take friends who couldn’t otherwise afford to eat there.”
Redzepi has been collecting the artist’s pieces for more than 20 years since stumbling across his work. “Back then, as a line cook, buying it felt like a stretch, but something clicked within me when I read, ‘The monster has caught up with me at last and is about to eat me. I am not unhappy about this. I am old and the monster is starving.’”
Shrigley is sanguine as he looks back over his career: “I’m 55 and I’m in my prime. There aren’t many other careers you get to do that.” Are there any brands he would like to work with? “Heinz Baked Beanz. I’ve got a fetish about baked beans — well, I eat a lot.” Watch out, Heinz: Beanz Meanz Shrigley.
David Shrigley Copenhagen Prints is at Jealous Gallery, 53 Curtain Road, London EC2, from Thursday until June 1; jealousgallery.com
