The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of work by British artist David Shrigley, to be held from 6 May – 26 November 2017 in its newly opened visitor center, which expands the Foundation’s campus of converted galleries in Reading, Vermont.  Approximately twenty-five works including drawings, animations, paintings and sculpture from the Hall Collection will be on view. Shrigley is best known for a distinctive and deceptively simple drawing style and for creating works that satirize contemporary society and everyday life.  By engaging his audience with humor, Shrigley’s work appears light-hearted while tackling serious and universal issues like death, love and war.

Untitled (2005) is a classic example of a Shrigley drawing.  Executed in black ink on white paper in a purposefully amateurish, child-like style, Shrigley juxtaposes the serious and the absurd with a hand-rendered list of words inside an explosion bubble that reads: “WAR”, “CARNAGE”, “DEATH”, “TORTURE”, “SUFFERING”, “+ ANNOYING MUSIC”.

Shrigley’s animations evolved from his drawings. New Friends (2006) is an animation of a square figure marching with a group of other square figures. The square accidentally falls through a hole and lands amongst a group of circle figures. In befriending the square figure, the circle figures shave off its corners, causing the square obvious distress and turning it into a circle. Although the narrative, set to the cheerful music of a marching band, is amusing, it also addresses issues of immigration and conformity.

While drawing is at the centre of Shrigley’s practice, he also works across an extensive range of media including sculpture. Using found or everyday objects as his source, Shrigley imbues his sculptures with new meaning through play in scale, material and context. Made of fragile ceramic, Boots (2010), is transformed by Shrigley from an item whose functionality, durability and wearability are normally prioritized, into a delicate and unusable sculpture. In Bomb (2010), also made of glazed ceramic, an object normally associated with war and destruction is made into a delicate form. The format of a red neon sign, Hot Dog Repair (2013) evokes commercial shop signs despite the impossibility of the service being advertised. 

In large works on paper, Shrigley introduces paint and color to his compositions. Untitled (Landscape) (2010) presents a pared-down, schematic rendering of a landscape made of blocks of solid colors. Untitled (All of my artwork) (2014), which shows a crudely painted statue of a heroic male figure on a plinth next to the text “ALL OF MY ARTWORK IS OF A VERY HIGH STANDARD”, parodies the tradition of art-making itself.

David Shrigley was born in 1968 in Macclesfield, England. His drawings, animations, paintings and sculpture have been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Most recently, one-man exhibitions have been held at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2014-2015); the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, MA (2016); and the British Council’s exhibition, Lose Your Mind, which has traveled to the Hospicio Cabaňas in Guadalajara, the Museo De Arte Contemporaneo in Santiago, Storage by Hyundai Card in Seoul, and is currently on view at the CoCA in Christchurch, NZ. Also recently exhibited was his 'monumental' public artwork, MEMORIAL with Public Art Fund in New York City’s Central Park, and Life Model II at the Rose Art Museum. In September 2016, Shrigley's Really Good, a seven-meter-tall bronze sculpture of a hand giving a thumb’s up, was unveiled in Trafalgar Square for the Fourth Plinth Commission, where it will be on view until March 2018. His work is represented in many prominent institutional collections worldwide, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary Art Foundation, Vienna; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Tate, London; and The British Council, London, among others. Shrigley was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2013. He lives and works in Brighton, England.

The Hall Art Foundation in Reading, Vermont is open weekends and Wednesdays by appointment.

Appointments are available at 11 AM, 1 PM and 3 PM.

Admission is free.

Boxed lunches are available for purchase up to 24 hours before your visit.

Donations to help support our programming are always appreciated.

544 VT Route 106
Reading, VT 05062

For more information and images, please contact the Foundation’s administrative office at + 1 212 256 0057 or info@hallartfoundation.org.