45 year old David Shrigley is one of this years Turner prize nominees for his exhibition 'Brain Activity' at the Hayward gallery in London.
Looking at Shrigley's work it soon becomes clear that his passion is producing cartoons through a range of mediums including paintings drawings, sculpture, text, photography and animation. his deliberately badly drawn images play with the everyday and the obvious and present them to us in their simplest form, each laced with comedy subtitles or darker, sinister undertones.
There's no doubt these images are entertaining to look at and a lot really make you laugh out loud but this can be said of thousands of comic strips in magazines and papers which begs the question:
Is this worthy of a Turner prize nomination?
I'm sure Shrigley would argue the fact that he is a trained artist and this in itself makes his work art, but scribbled stick men and witty text will not please everyone and Shrigley's work is far from unique.
Shrigley's photographs are produced in the same simplistic, non-technical form as his drawings.
'Severed Hand', a snapshot of a hand chopped at the wrist and laying on the floor seems pretty boring until you notice the two eyes stuck above the thumb making a small face. Suddenly the image becomes fun, but is it art? Does the image warrant a space on the gallery wall as part of a major show?
In Shrigley's world it does and in one interview when asked how he would explain his work to someone who didn't understand it he simply stated "I wouldn't".
His exhibitions always pull a crowd and his work sells and is often featured in magazines & newspapers and he classes himself as a fine artist, making a living from his work.
Shrigley's combination of image, text, visual jokes and animations are simple to look at and digest. He comes across as a sort of monty python/stand up comedian of the art world but from his comments you get the feeling he's not annoyed by not being taken too seriously. "I feel I'm taken far more serious than I should be anyway" he says in his Time out interview "my work is filed in the humour section of bookshops but also in the fine art section so i've got my feet in both camps. I'm very lucky".
Leaving art school with a very poor mark Shrigley says it was all due to his tutors not understanding what he was trying to do "I just don't think they knew anything about art!"he says " I think they thought I was doing something inappropriate".
Regardless of this he went on to have work regularly featured in the Guardian, Harpers and Queen, Independant on Sunday and has made music videos for bands such as Blur. He has established himself as a working artist and someone to be watched in the future. Not bad for someone who almost failed art school.
David Shrigley makes us ask the all important question 'Do we like his work or not, Is it really art?'
Personally I like it all, but I'm not sure whether its due to the comedy value or the artistic value?
Either way I think he's guaranteed himself a future in the art world.
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