http:\/\/www.davidshrigley.com<\/a>) is governed by an almost infantile cruelty and a fascination with things quite unrelated to the adult world with its rigid regard for norms and conventions. Dirt, fluids, animals, insects, monsters and completely asocial characters abound in his work. As Katrina M. Brown remarks in a catalogue text on the artist: \u2018Though there is an undeniable humour in Shrigley\u2019s work, it is not light, bright and witty but markedly sinister, with an inclination toward what is inferior in life.\u2019 Insects, fluids, dirt, hidden things are brought into the foreground, like the curled-up bug-eyed creatures in his sculpture The Contents of the Gap between the Refrigerator and the Cooker\u2014or to put it another way, all the germs, creepy-crawlies, grime, scraps of food and other imaginable and unimaginable items that accumulate in unswept, unthought-of spaces over the years. All of them are products of our fantasies, or our nightmares, and conjure up a world far removed from norms and conventions, where control and appearances mean nothing. <\/p>\nThe protagonists of Shrigley\u2019s works tend to be strange characters: sociopaths, at once vicious and lovable, they experience situations that reveal strange logics, in which fear, phobias, love, cruelty and tenderness are constant presences. This is true of Pete, for example, the unbalanced protagonist of the animation Who I Am and What I Want, made with Chris Shepherd. Pete talks about his life, his desires and his dreams. He tells the story of a life of excess that has led him to turn away from the ferocious competitiveness of the city and take refuge in the woods, where he lives with animals. The strange becomes commonplace, the ordinary gives way to the extraordinary. <\/p>\n
There is a tender and subtle David Shrigley, the Shrigley who can take a photograph of a balloon with a smiley face in the rumpled sheets of an unmade bed. But there is also a more acid and bitter Shrigley, the Shrigley who offers us a decapitated stuffed cat, a stuffed squirrel holding its head in its hands as if it were a nut, or a tooth riddled with cavities in front of a mirror (What Decay Looks Like). <\/p>\n