David Musgrave, 2004

David Shrigley's drawings, while apparently simple, are composed of numerous fictions. It would be a mistake to treat their voice, which is sometimes authoritarian, sometimes meek, as Shrigley's own. Their various failings are also to be treated with caution, as every line serves a function. With great economy, whole world-views are hinted at (the underlying structure of nature is revealed to be 'boring'); our existence, the World Spirit elsewhere discloses, is governed by omnipotent worms) and an atmosphere of stoical despair persists beneath comic profundities. Very simple schemata seem to underpin the drawings, but these tend to slip out of place and corrupt the draughtsmanship in one picture, for instance, from the book Who I Am and What I Want, a personage's face grins inanely from its neck. Shrigley's drawings seem not to be the result of bad draughtsmanship so much as a careful destruction of drawing's normal rules. 'How the aliens see us ...' is a joke, but it also artfully muddles abstraction and figuration while pointing to the limits of visual understanding.