Currently the Hayward Gallery in Londen is hosting Brain Activity, exhibiting work by British artist David Shrigley. Shrigley is mostly known for his drawings, but the exhibition features photographs, animated shorts and sculptures as well. Describing his work as ‘somewhere between graphic comic book art and conceptual art’, Shrigley has a talent to turn the everyday into the absurd, remarking his work ‘looks like it’s made by somebody you wouldn’t want to meet’. 

Shrigley has made around 25,000 drawings, 7000 of which were published or exhibited. The drawings are like one-page narratives: “Each drawing I make is a narrative that you read top to bottom, left to right, and it’s all there. (…) The delivery of the message is all there in that structure.”

Shrigley’s photographs are rooted in the course Environmental Art he was taking at Glasgow School of Art. Students were asked to make site-specific work in the public domain, and Shrigley created interventions in the urban landscape he then photographed. “In terms of making ‘public art’ I’ve never felt that I wanted anything I did to last, I don’t want to permanently alter the world. Only the city council is allowed to the change things forever.”

In the early 2000s Shrigley started making animations. Among the first were commercial promo’s for songs by Blur and Bonnie ‘Prince’  Billy, while his recent works includes different types of storytelling. The work above, Light Switch (2007), is a reference to Martin Creed’s Work No. 227: The Light going on and off. The latter featured an empty room in which the light switched on and off every five seconds; Creed won the Turner prize for that in 2001.

Death and headlessness are both recurring themes in Shrigley’s work. “When it comes to death, I prefer to see the humorous side of it as you can’t change anything about it anyway.” “It’s a matter of making fun of the things you could get depressed about.”

Brain Activity runs until the 13th of May. More info here.