Before You Can Entertain Other
Condition reports and provenance available upon request
About This Work
David Shrigley’s *Before You Can Entertain Other* distils his singular gift for turning deadpan humour into disarming clarity. Rendered with his characteristically economical line and unvarnished text, the work adopts the visual directness of a hand-made notice—at once intimate and insistently public. Shrigley’s deliberately plain draftsmanship heightens the sting of the message, inviting viewers to weigh the gap between self-improvement rhetoric and the messy reality of everyday feeling. The pared-back composition focuses attention on rhythm, spacing, and the tonal friction between image and language, producing an immediate visual punch that lingers as an ethical question. Significant within Shrigley’s practice, the piece exemplifies how his deceptively simple technique reframes contemporary anxieties—care, responsibility, and selfhood—into a concise, memorable encounter.
About the Artist
David John Shrigley (born 17 September 1968) is a British visual artist. He lived and worked in Glasgow, Scotland for 27 years before moving to Brighton, England in 2015. Shrigley first came to prominence in the 1990s for his distinct line drawings, which often deal with witty, surreal and darkly h...
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Contemporary Art • Hampstead, London
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