David Shrigley: Recent Prints
Until September 16; Edinburgh Printmakers

NEWS. NOBODY LIKES YOU. Welcome to David Shrigley’s world, where the rug gets pulled from under your feet more times than you can count, but you land with a smile every time. If he’s not preying on your feelings of inadequacy, he’ll be reminding you of your mortality. When he’s feeling particularly wicked, he’ll start toying with your brain’s basic systems for anchoring you in the world. And still, you’ll be smiling.

You’re bound to have seen Shrigley’s work by now; if not in one of his many books, then in a greetings card, or a pop video (including that poignant moment in the promo for Blur's Good Song, when a squirrel accidentally gnaws at his lover's head). Even if you’ve never seen his work, you’ll have seen expensive adverts sporting awkward little drawings and hasty scribbles, a trend very possibly inspired by Shrigley’s punkish disregard for traditional standards of finish.

NEWS. NOBODY LIKES YOU. The words shout at you from a metre-high screenprint, made this year at Edinburgh Printmakers, and hanging near the entrance to Shrigley’s exhibition. In their own sledgehammer way, even these words make you smile. It’s nice to know that your own deep, dark fear applies to all and sundry, and it’s liberating to see it roundly mocked.

Unusually for Shrigley, that’s as wordy as it gets. For a man who has been influenced more heavily by literature than by fine art, this show is remarkably light on prose. The usual handwritten captions, complete with mis-spellings and scorings out, are few and far between, and in 20 etchings and 20 woodcuts, the pictures get to do the talking.

That introduces a bit of welcome ambiguity into the equation. A man with a question mark over his head stares into the mirror. His reflection stares back, the question mark reversed. The man finds no easy answer in the mirror, just a mangled version of his confusion coming back at him. Shrigley’s images offer us a similar deal.

What’s going on, for example, with the little scuba diver, deep in the ocean? His air bubbles waft up to the surface of the water, while he contemplates a skeleton on the sea bed. A fish hovers, too, its bubbles joining the diver’s. For all its simplicity, this little encounter between two living creatures and one dead sets up an intriguing scenario where you really want to know what happens next.

In Shrigley’s world, the little fish would probably turn out to be a piranha who can’t believe his luck when dessert drops in straight after the main course. One way or the other, we are witnessing a man coming face to face with his own mortality, a theme which is never far from the surface of Shrigley’s works. The sand in his hourglass, you will note from another image, is exactly half-way.

Part of Shrigley’s success is due to the warmth that permeates his work. No matter how smart-ass he might seem to get, the work comes from a part of him that is not capable of conceit. And while drawing is a relatively delicate pursuit, the woodcuts in this show, brutally chiselled as they are, come loaded with emotional force. Some images are so streaked through with explosive scrawls that they resemble good old-fashioned expressionist angst.

Despite the wilfully clumsy nature of Shrigley’s outlines, his compositions can be extremely elegant. The artist has distilled his visual shorthand to the point where nothing interferes with his thoughts, as they make their way from his brain to ours. A simple horizontal line places people and objects in the physical world, and those abbreviated people and objects make LS Lowry look like a master of naturalism.

Sometimes the shortcuts become more than a means to an end. A basic white rectangle on a black background is captioned “REFRIGERATOR”. A roughly sketched starburst radiates from the single word “DRAMA!”. A crude honeycomb contains a multitude of “B”s. In his wanton laziness, Shrigley exposes art as a series of systematic shortcuts totally detached from the reality of things. Though artists have been exercised by this complex theme for over a century, never before has it looked quite so effortlessly simple.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 30.07.06