David Shrigley

David Shrigley was born on 17 September 1968 in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England. He completed a foundation course in Art and Design at Leicester Polytechnic, now De Montfort University, in 1987, then studied Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1991. He remained based in Glasgow for many years, developing a body of work built from intentionally awkward ink drawings paired with handwritten, often absurd or bluntly confessional text, alongside sculpture, animation, and self-published books.

His profile grew steadily through the 2000s and 2010s with solo exhibitions at Dundee Contemporary Arts, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Bergen Kunsthall, and a major survey, Brain Activity, at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2012, which later traveled to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. His animated short film Who I Am and What I Want won the Tiger Short Film Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2006. In 2013 he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. In 2016 he was awarded the Fourth Plinth Commission in Trafalgar Square, London, unveiling the sculpture Really Good, and in 2020 he was appointed OBE for services to visual arts. He continues to exhibit internationally, including a 2025 to 2026 solo show at Stephen Friedman Gallery in London and a major survey at Kunsthal Rotterdam. He lives and works in Brighton, England.

Critics have consistently framed Shrigley's work as a deliberate collision of crude technique and serious intent, using flat, unpolished drawing and blunt language to carry real anxiety, absurdity, and dark comedy. That tension between deliberate crudeness and genuine popularity has run through critical writing on his practice, from his 2012 Hayward Gallery survey Brain Activity and his 2014 to 2015 survey David Shrigley: Life and Life Drawing at the National Gallery of Victoria, to his 2013 Turner Prize shortlisting and the wide public visibility of Really Good on the Fourth Plinth in 2016.

David Shrigley's auction record is Memorial (A Five-Metre Monument), a sculpture that sold for GBP 137,575 (about USD 165,100 including fees) in February 2023. The auction house and exact sale date have not been independently confirmed in available public sources. Outside this result, his auction activity is dominated by prints and drawings, which typically trade in the low five figures or less, reflecting an artist whose commercial reach runs heavily through affordable editions, publishing, and gallery sales rather than a deep history of high-value single-lot auction results.

There is no catalogue raisonne for David Shrigley, so provenance and authenticity are best confirmed through his representing galleries, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Galleri Nicolai Wallner, and Anton Kern Gallery. His market spans a wide range, from widely available prints to unique sculpture, and his single auction record of USD 165,100 sits on a thin base of comparable sales, so it should be read as one notable data point rather than a stable benchmark. His continuing institutional program, including museum surveys, a public commission, and national honors, is the more reliable signal of long-term standing.