Overview
“I've made maybe 30 [screenprints] over the last eight years or so and it's a good time to maybe look back and see what I've done.” - David Shrigley, July 2020
“I've made maybe 30 [screenprints] over the last eight years or so and it's a good time to maybe look back and see what I've done.” - David Shrigley, July 2020
Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to present ‘Multiple III’, the third iteration of its annual exhibition of editions by gallery artists. This year’s online presentation brings together a complete catalogue raisonné of David Shrigley’s screenprints from 2012 onwards and is accompanied by the launch of a new edition by the British artist.
Shrigley is best known for his distinctive drawing style and works that are deadpan in humour. He first made prints while studying at Glasgow School of Art by experimenting with woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and monoprints. His screenprints, however, are a more recent development in his practice. The artist explains, “the motivation for making them was that in the last seven or eight years I've made a lot of colour work on paper, acrylic paint on paper and I'm really aware that when you make works on paper they disappear quite quickly.” Shrigley continues, “I found that making screenprints was a way of kind of keeping hold of the work... it allows for the work still to be around somehow and for it to be seen in a lot of different places.” Recurring themes and thoughts pervade Shrigley’s screenprints, capturing child-like views of the world, the perspective of animals and the appreciation or criticism of music. These quick-witted works often reveal chance utterings and snippets of overheard conversations.
Scroll down to view the works.
Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to present ‘Multiple III’, the third iteration of its annual exhibition of editions by gallery artists. This year’s online presentation brings together a complete catalogue raisonné of David Shrigley’s screenprints from 2012 onwards and is accompanied by the launch of a new edition by the British artist.
Shrigley is best known for his distinctive drawing style and works that are deadpan in humour. He first made prints while studying at Glasgow School of Art by experimenting with woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and monoprints. His screenprints, however, are a more recent development in his practice. The artist explains, “the motivation for making them was that in the last seven or eight years I've made a lot of colour work on paper, acrylic paint on paper and I'm really aware that when you make works on paper they disappear quite quickly.” Shrigley continues, “I found that making screenprints was a way of kind of keeping hold of the work... it allows for the work still to be around somehow and for it to be seen in a lot of different places.” Recurring themes and thoughts pervade Shrigley’s screenprints, capturing child-like views of the world, the perspective of animals and the appreciation or criticism of music. These quick-witted works often reveal chance utterings and snippets of overheard conversations.
A new edition depicts a rainbow assortment of crayons accompanied by a request rendered in the artist’s distinctive handwriting to use them to “write all over your walls.” This work combines a humorous proclamation with painterly dexterity. The artist states, “I think screen printing in the way that I do it, it's made with a lot of screens so it's actually very difficult to tell the difference between the screenprint and the original painting. So even the more matte versus gloss parts of the paint is replicated in the screenprint. Sometimes the screenprint has more than 30 different screens. So I can't really tell which is which unless I actually touch the surface of the screenprint.”
“I think I made my first screenprint in 2012, so I guess it's only been about eight years that I've been making them. The motivation for making them was that in the last seven or eight years I've made a lot of colour work on paper, acrylic paint on paper, and I'm really aware that when you make works on paper they disappear quite quickly.”
- David Shrigley, July 2020
Shrigley produced Untitled (I love pets and things and people) in 2019 as part of a project for Save the Children. Alongside a selection of artists including Tracey Emin, Harland Miller, Rob Pruitt, and Sir Anthony Gormley, Shrigley explored the theme of 'childhood' to create this screenprint which would be sold to raise funds for the charity.
In 2018, David Shrigley collaborated with Human rights organisation Liberty to launch a campaign to call on the government to 'Keep Britain Kind'. Untitled (Kindness) is one of several pieces Shrigley designed for the cause and is the first print he launched with Stephen Friedman Gallery.
"We need to unite and champion all that’s best about the UK – our humour, our diversity and our capacity for kindness"
– David Shrigley, 2018
"You can’t make direct reference to the rings, but fine art is all about being oblique, so I decided to take the Olympic torch and turn it into an ice cream.
"I like the notion of the Cultural Olympiad. Artists tend to be a bunch of non-sporty dweebs so it’s nice to be involved somehow."
- David Shrigley, "'I turned the Olympic torch into an ice cream': British artists reveal their Rio 2016 posters", The Guardian, August 2016
DAVID SHRIGLEY, b. 1968, United Kingdom
David Shrigley's quick-witted drawings and hand-rendered texts are typically deadpan in their humour and reveal chance utterings like snippets of over-heard conversations. Recurring themes and thoughts pervade his storytelling, capturing child-like views of the world, the perspective of aliens and monsters or the compulsive habits of an eavesdropper shouting out loud. While drawing is at the centre of his practice, Shrigley also works across an extensive range of media including sculpture, large-scale installation, animation, painting, photography and music. Shrigley consistently seeks to widen his audience by operating outside the gallery sphere, including producing artist publications and creating collaborative music projects.
Shrigley was a Turner Prize nominee in 2013, following his major mid-career retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London titled 'Brain Activity'. In September 2016, his monumental sculpture 'Really Good' was unveiled in Trafalgar Square, London for the Fourth Plinth Commission. From 2015 to 2018 the British Council-organised exhibition 'Lose Your Mind' travelled to six venues including Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China; Storage by Hyundai Card in Seoul, Korea and Instituto-Cultural-Cabañas in Guadalajara, Mexico. In January 2020 Shrigley was awarded the decoration of Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire or OBE. In March 2020, Ruinart Champagne announced Shrigley as its Artist Carte Blanche for 2020. The artist currently has an on-going presentation in the Gallery at Sketch, London as part of a long-term programme of artist-conceived restaurants.
