What The Hell Are You Doing?: The Essential David Shrigley

A beautifully designed and darkly comic collection of work, this book collects together the best of Shrigley's work, old and new. It is a celebration of the surreal world of one of our finest contemporary artists.

About the Author :
David Shrigley was born in Macclesfield in 1968 and studied at Glasgow School of Art. He has worked as a sculptor, photographer and 'environment artist' and, most famously, as a cartoonist and illustrator. His work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern in London, at the MoMA in New York, and in Paris, Berlin, Melbourne and beyond. He has published over twenty books, and has animated a music video for Blur and produced another for Bonny Prince Billy. His work has also been profiled in a documentary for Channel 4. He lives and works in Glasgow.

Review :
Weird, funny, abject, wise, silly, savage, moral and engaging. If you're looking for a humour/art crossover, then David Shrigley's stuff is spot on. I like the childlike aspect, and there's a lot of irony. It's a tricky thing to get right; a lot of people try to copy him. You look at some of his stuff and think: I could do that - but, like all great art, all the bits have to be in the right place for it to work. David Shrigley is probably the funniest gallery-type artist who ever lived. With a casual gesture Shrigley points to that hideous shape whose name I've never known - and then he names it. And the name is profoundly, embarrassingly familiar. I'm laughing while frantically searching for a pen, so desperate to capture the feeling he has unearthed in me. An artist who achieves that rarest of phenomena: the capacity to make his audience view the world in his terms entirely. . . [he] takes on everything: memory and forgetting, love and hate, murder and preservation, god and godlessness. Shrigley's comedy appears to confirm the belief of great humourists (from Laurence Sterne to Woody Allen) that laughter is synonymous with hope. In the arena of contemporary art, Shrigley's work maintains a dualism, which is rare, rewarding and ultimately generous. David Shrigley is a rare thing in the art world: someone whose work people - normal(ish) people - actually love The Glasgow-based arist's scribbly drawings and witty captions have inspired a cult following and a celebrity fanbase including Will Self and Franz Ferdinand. David Shridley's wonderfully skewed cartoons Shrigley specialises in the humour of a horny teenage boy crossed with an uptight conservative wrangling with modern moral dilemmas. Needless to say, we are in love. a must for fans of the absurd Funny and profound and surprisingly all at the same time . . . his work is smart, self-deprecating and cleverly understated. Ridiculously funny, weird, disturbing and thought-provoking all at the same time. David Shrigley will probably never be knighted but I think he should be. Arise Sir David.