Everything is Fine

About This Work

In the 2023 print "Everything is Fine," David Shrigley continues to wield his characteristic brand of dry humor and existential bravado. A prominent figure in contemporary British art, Shrigley’s work is instantly recognizable for its crude line drawings and witty, often lacerating, captions. The phrase "Everything is Fine" is emblematic of Shrigley’s oeuvre, playing with the absurdity and irony that define much of modern life. The visual simplicity of "Everything is Fine" belies its deeper, more melancholic undertones. Shrigley’s crude, childlike execution invites viewers into a world where the familiar is distorted and the banal becomes an unsettling stage. This juxtaposition of text and imagery underscores his ongoing exploration of anxiety and societal critique. In this print, the harmony between image and caption is deliberately dissonant, challenging the viewer to confront the divergence between appearance and reality. As with much of Shrigley's work, the humor is laced with a tinge of existential dread, as if the innocuous phrase were scribbled in a moment of reassurance yet undercut by the starkness of contemporary concerns. David Shrigley’s broad artistic practice, spanning drawing, sculpture, animation, and printmaking, continuously delves into themes of disquiet and irony. Since his emergence in the 1990s through photocopied self-published books and comic strips for major British newspapers, Shrigley has captured the cultural zeitgeist with his blunt, often absurd sketches. While each line may appear deceptively simple, Shrigley's work is layered with nuance and social commentary. His major public commissions, including the thumb of "Really Good" on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth and the interactive "Life Model" at the Hayward Gallery, reveal his flair for merging the public and the personal, the humorous and the profound. "Everything is Fine" finds its place within the Zebra One Gallery collection as a quintessential example of Shrigley’s ability to distill the complexities of human experience into something raw, immediate, and enduringly resonant.

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...

Zebra One Gallery

Contemporary Art • Hampstead, London

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