Turner Prize finalist to exhibit in Auckland during arts festival

David Shrigley
Two Rooms
Auckland Arts Festival 2015 March 6– April 18

As part of next year's Auckland Arts Festival the Two Rooms gallery will be exhibiting work of David Shrigley as part of its International Residency Programme. This will be the first time he has exhibited in New Zealand.

Glasgow-based artist David Shrigley, who was born in 1968 in Macclesfield, is best known for his distinctive drawing style and works that make satirical and incisive comments on everyday situations and human interactions – often with a dark and comedic sense.

His quick-witted drawings and hand-rendered texts are typically deadpan in their humour and reveal chance utterings like snippets of over- heard conversations.

Reccurring 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, the artist also works across an extensive range of media including sculpture, large-scale installation, animation, painting, photography and music.

Shrigley consistently seeks to widen his public by operating frequently outside the gallery sphere such as in prolific artist publications and collaborative music projects. In 2012 he co-authored a ‘sort-of-opera’ titled ‘Pass the Spoon’, and more recently this year he transformed the Gallery at Sketch café in London as part of a long-term programme of artist- conceived restaurants.

His digital animations such as Headless Drummer and ‘The Artist’ demonstrate what Shrigley calls "the economy of telling stories," delivering a deftly crafted mix of dark and light through the simplest of forms. In his sculptural works that explore materials such as bronze and ceramic, the artist makes physical some of his more curious and eccentric propositions by transforming found objects or by playing with their scale.

Taking Lewis Carroll's perspective of Wonderland, Shrigley enlarges objects and imbues them with curious proportions. English art critic Adrian Searle has noted, "Shrigley's work is very wrong and very bad in all sorts of ways. It is also ubiquitous and compelling. There are lots of artists who, furrowing their brows and trying to convince us of their seriousness, aren't half as profound or compelling."

David Shrigley was a Turner Prize finalist in 2013 and will exhibit his bronze work Really Good as part of the Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square in for 2016. He is currently the subject of a major solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. In 2012, the Hayward Gallery, London, hosted a major retrospective entitled Brain Activity, which toured to San Francisco. He has also had solo exhibitions in Munich, Berlin, Manchester, Mumbai, Finland, Bergen, and Gateshead. Shrigley’s works are included in prominent collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary Art Foundation, Vienna; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and Tate, London.