David Shrigley: ‘Monet was a better painter – but my work sits better on a tea towel’ ...Middle East

If you’re wondering whether you’ve seen anything by British artist David Shrigley, the answer is undoubtedly yes, and quite possibly the last time you were in the supermarket browsing the “humorous birthday cards” section. His sardonic pairings of skillfully inept drawings and pithy text have done long and successful service on mugs, greetings cards and tea towels, and no wonder. Their gentle melancholy – a large yellow lemon accompanied by the words “when life gives you a lemon you must eat the lemon, all of it including the skin”, or, of an umbrella: “It blew away in the wind; I did not care” – is irresistible. Such creations were memes before the fact. Now in the age of Instagram they have even broader appeal, reflected in Shrigley’s latest collaboration with phone case and accessories brand CASETiFY.

It’s a state of affairs that he is mildly perplexed by. Having set out in the late 80s to be a conceptual artist, he’s ended up as “a bit of a cartoonist”, he tells me on a video call from Brighton. “I’m not quite sure how that happened, but I suppose the point is that there’s never been any strategy to what I do. I’m probably more strategic now than I ever have been in my life, but that’s more to do with having people to help me do it.”

Born in Macclesfield in 1968, Shrigley grew up in Leicestershire, graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1991 with a 2:2. That this lacklustre performance has provided an ongoing and unresolved cause for bitterness is a well-rehearsed part of Shrigley’s narrative. In reality, though, he sounds perfectly at ease with the limitations of his talent: “I don’t really demonstrate that many craft skills; my work isn’t graphically sophisticated in any way – quite the opposite, which people always comment upon – I’m an unusual candidate for being a graphic artist.”

If his art school years passed uneventfully, it was Shrigley’s good fortune that his early career coincided with the momentous, scene-shifting arrival of the YBAs in the late 80s and 90s. In the midst of their assault on the expectations and values heaped on art in the late 20th century, in 1995 Shrigley was featured on the cover of Frieze magazine, after which his sales and profile increased.

Over time, Shrigley realised “that the things that I really like are just not the things that other people like”. His core fanbase is not middle-aged men like himself, but women between the ages of 25 and 35 who live in London. Though he was initially surprised by this information, it’s not unwelcome, he says: “I wouldn’t want it to be the same demographic that I would go to a football match with, or go and see bands.”

In a world where cultural references are increasingly diverse, experienced in isolation via online services that allow us to tailor our listening and viewing to our own specific tastes, shared enjoyment across ages and backgrounds feels increasingly precious: “I don’t really want to appeal to my [own] demographic,” explains Shrigley. “I mean, I suppose I do to some extent – but there’s something very heartening about the work being of interest to people younger than yourself.”

As with literature and music, the cultural establishment is not always forgiving of art that achieves popular appeal and commercial success, let alone when it so gleefully rejects accomplishment, to adopt a formula that looks very much like money for old rope. But though Shrigley has leaned into the commercial world, he has serious cachet, and was nominated for the 2013 Turner Prize, and awarded the Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth commission in 2016. He has works in the collections of Tate Britain, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, and in 2020 was made an OBE for services to visual arts.

I disliked Shrigley’s best-known sculpture, Really Good, an ugly, seven-metre-high, thumbs up sign selected as Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth Commission in 2016. Unveiled a matter of months after the referendum, it was interpreted by some as an expression of Brexit sympathies, though Shrigley himself was more elliptical, saying that it was intended as a self-fulfilling prophecy in which things considered “bad, such as the economy, the weather and society will benefit from a change of consensus towards positivity”. 

This is what makes his graphic work successful – the bluntness of message and image, its awkward, relatable humour, is reliably amusing in a gentle, inoffensive way that is ideal for gift products.

“I think it’s a positive thing for the work to be very accessible on a mug or a greetings card, and for it to be taken seriously by some people in the art world – not by everybody, but after a certain point, I have to really not care about that stuff,” he says. As a very specific form of public art, presenting work on phone cases is a special opportunity: “It’s really interesting because the context of the work is totally different every time somebody sees it.”

The works selected for the CASETiFY collaboration showcase the range of mild but insane understatement for which the artist is famed. One is a drawing of a person in a tiny boat, stranded in a stormy sea, with the caption: “Absolutely no problem at all, everything is totally fine”. Enthusiastic banalities – “It was fantastic” – are equally typical, likewise the hopeless optimism of “A gap in the clouds”, a phrase that has done veteran service on countless rainy Bank Holidays. Such references, delivered with dry-as-dust humour, have a particularly British sensibility, but Shrigley’s fanbase is surprisingly international, its significant Scandinavian contingent attested to by the Copenhagen shop.

Shrigley’s own favourite phone case, currently in use on his own device, lists “Opening Hours” (closed every day): “One of the reasons I like this one is because it’s got a mirror on it, so you can check whether you’ve got porridge stuck in your teeth,” he says.

It’s the simple messages and unsophisticated images that make them so easily transferrable across different vehicles, from phone cases and posters to other everyday objects. To put it bluntly, as Shrigley doesn’t hesitate to do himself, his works are not diminished by this treatment, in the way that the art of the very best painters most certainly is. “Take Courbet or Monet,” he says. “Their work doesn’t sit well on a tea towel, but mine does, so I’m lucky in that respect. However, Monet was a much better painter than I will ever be. I fully acknowledge that.”

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Demand for Shrigley’s graphic work has required him to shift the emphasis of his practice. He’s largely stopped making object-based sculpture, and has turned instead to projects, with a particular focus on art education. The most recent was a giant animatronic praying mantis called Mantis Muse, which for two weeks last year was resident at his former secondary school in Leicestershire, and the subject of life drawing, yoga and biology classes. “It was an opportunity to talk about the importance of art education within education as a whole,” says Shrigley, who has highlighted the drop in UK students opting for humanities and arts subjects, advocating STEAM not STEM as “a more balanced educational diet”.

He’s also involved in The Other MA (TOMA), a not-for-profit postgraduate fine art course at Southend-on-Sea, aimed at supporting artists who have faced barriers accessing art education and the “art world”.

Fundamentally, he says, there is a general failure to understand why art education is valuable: “People just seem to think that art is a hobby – hobbies are important – but there’s something about your existence as a human being where you do need to have the agency that being creative gives you in order to be a functional person, a happy person, but also to inform whatever else you do.” Making art as ordinary and essential to daily life as a mobile phone is a small but significant piece of the puzzle. 

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