I Cannot Live Without You
Condition reports and provenance available upon request
About This Work
David Shrigley’s *I Cannot Live Without You* distils intimacy into his signature deadpan visual language, pairing spare drawing with a disarmingly direct text intervention. Executed with an intentionally unpolished line and economical composition, the work embraces the aesthetics of the everyday—echoing vernacular signage, doodles, and the casual urgency of handwritten confession. Shrigley’s technique weaponises simplicity: humour becomes a conduit for vulnerability, and the blunt declaration oscillates between devotion, dependence, and critique of romantic cliché. Situated within contemporary British conceptual art, the piece reflects a wider cultural appetite for meme-like immediacy and quotable sentiment, while retaining the bite of institutional critique. A compact, resonant statement on communication, desire, and emotional economy.
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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