David Shrigley

Yvon Lambert is pleased to announce David Shrigley's sixth exhibition at the gallery. It will feature two hundred new drawings and an ensemble of recent sculptures.

The exhibition opens on Wednesday, July 6 from 6 to 9 PM and will be on view until August 31, 2011. The artist will be present.   Derision, scathing irony, corrosive spirit, deadpan, hilarity of the absurd - humour as a means of grace reveals and transcend its tragic opposite. David Shrigley's drawings perfectly illustrate British wit, how one's phlegmatic distance from oneself, from others or from the world defuses and diverts daily annoyances, nighttime anxieties, and life dramas. Hair of the dog - meaning to fight fire with fire avoiding esprit de sérieux at all costs. With his drawing's hesitant, almost child-like lines, Shrigley reinvents a comical catharsis of sorts. They could be the work of a Peter Pan after reading Kierkegaard.   A few lines, a few words and one finds oneself smiling. Daily situations or objects are seen differently - it is hard to enjoy a pint when you know that ants have sex in your beer, or to seriously watch Michael Jackson moonwalk once you have seen how Shrigley draws him. Each drawing sums his views, and the more you see his work the more you appreciate its humour.   In this exhibition, Shrigley presents two hundred drawings and an ensemble of sculpture: a dozen giant ceramic eggs - 50 to 60 centimetres in height - installed across the exhibition space and displayed at different heights. On their shiny white shell the artiste wrote the evidence: EGG, leaving us speechless. What chicken could have laid such an UFO (unidentified fragile object)? What rare chicks will they hatch? Shrigley is telling us he still has plenty of little monsters in store. He also assesses with irony long-lasting debates: creation (chicken or the egg?), mimesis (after Magritte's pipe, Shrigley's egg), nominalism (this is an egg because I say so).   Since graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 1991, David Shrigley has cultivated an appreciable style in numerous gallery exhibitions and publications. He has also worked on various projects with other artists and musicians (Shrigley directed the videos for Blur's Good Song Agnes and Bonnie Prince Bill's Queen of Sorrow).   David Shrigley (1968, Macclesfield, England) lives and works in Glasgow. He has had solo exhibitions at international venues including the CCA Glasgow, UCLA Hammer Museum of Los Angeles, Camden Arts Centre in London, Kunsthaus Zürich, Malmö Konsthall and Museum Ludwig. The London Hayward Gallery will host an important exhibition of his work in 2012.

David Shrigley