David Shrigley is an internationally-acclaimed artist with a distinctive comedic tone that draws on everyday situations and human interactions to create self-reflexive artworks. While best known for his simple and unique drawing style, Shrigley works in a variety of mediums including photography, sculpture, and film, while also creating public works and artist publications, and collaborating on music projects.

Shrigley’s talk accompanies Public Art Fund’s upcoming exhibition David Shrigley: MEMORIAL, a new public artwork that embodies the artist’s interest in the absurd potential and poignant nature of the everyday. Consisting of a single slab of granite measuring approximately 17 feet by 7 feet with an ordinary grocery list engraved on its surface, MEMORIAL plays on the historical significance of granite public monuments, often found in public parks and erected to celebrate and remember great endeavors. Shrigley’s universal monument, however, pays homage both to no-one and to everyone by honoring and memorializing the mundane act of making a grocery list.

For his talk at The New School, Shrigley focuses on his multidisciplinary practice, including his various works in the public realm, among them Really Good, a ten-foot-tall bronze “thumbs-up” sculpture, to be installed this fall in London’s Trafalgar Square, as part of the city’s Fourth Plinth Commission; his design for Kingsley, the official mascot for a Scottish Premiership football team (2015); and How Are You Feeling?, The High Line’s billboard commission (2012).

David Shrigley (b. 1968, Macclesfield, UK) lives and works in Brighton, UK. A Turner Prize nominee in 2013, his recent solo exhibitions include David Shrigley, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2016); Really Good, Fourth Plinth Commission, London (2016); David Shrigley, Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland Arts Festival, New Zealand (2015); David Shrigley: Life and Life Drawing, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2014-15); David Shrigley, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2014); Big Shoes, BQ, Berlin, Germany (2013); How Are You Feeling?, Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK (2012-13); Brain Activity, Hayward Gallery, London (2012), which toured to Yerba Beuna Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, USA (2013); Drawings, Mumbai Art Rooms, India (2012); Animate, Turku Art Museum, Finland (2011); David Shrigley, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway (2009); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2008); To the Wall: David Shrigley with Lily Van der Stokker, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2007); and David Shrigley, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland (2006). David Shrigley is represented by Anton Kern Gallery.

Books That Matter (to David Shrigley)
Franz Kafka, The Trial
James Orwell, 1984
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
Donald Barthelme, Forty Stories
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991
John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket

Public Art Fund Talks at The New School feature internationally-renowned artists who offer their insights into art and its personal, social, and cultural contexts. This joint initiative between Public Art Fund and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics conceives of New York City’s urban environment as a university campus, an artist’s studio, as well as an evolving commons. PAF’s commitment to art in the public realm and the VLC’s embrace of art as political expression encourage a dynamic platform for artists to reflect on their practice and to offer a new understanding about the changing nature of public space today.

Public Art Fund Talks at The New School are organized by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

This program is made possible in part by Con Edison and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, as well as by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

The event is also made possible, in part, with support from the Advisory Committee of the Vera List Center.