David Shrigley — from Drama to Comedy

With the show “Brain Activity” London’s Hayward gallery is dedicating its spaces to David Shrigley’s humorous art. Though he is widely known for his quirky drawings and handwritten texts, his work also extends to sculpture, photography, animated films, neon signs, and music — as the gallery impressively portraits.

Some times his art is pointless:

Other times his art is brutally honest:

It’s an odd but pleasant sensation to stand in the gallery and watch art aficionadas and aficionados burst out into laughter. The serious facade of the white cube breaks apart and the gallery space becomes one big social installation, full of human interaction.
This is probably Shrigley’s strongest achievement of all; He manages to utilize comedy in it’s most dramatic form, and by doing so deconstructs the museum as an institution. And he places us viewers into a new relationship with the art and especially with each other.

From an architectural point of view this is especially amusing as the Hayward Gallery is part of the Southbank Centre complex — a brutalist’s wet dream of over scaled concrete masses. Built by Sir Denys Lasdun in the 1960s its main features are an overabundance of exposed concrete and lots of lost pedestrians searching for their way while trying to make sense of the numerous maps erected to their rescue.