Balance The Ball on My Nose
Condition reports and provenance available upon request
About This Work
In *Balance The Ball on My Nose*, David Shrigley distills the absurdity of self-control into a single, disarming image. Rendered with his signature pared-back line and deadpan economy, the work evokes the immediacy of a handwritten instruction or improvised cartoon, where precision is less important than psychological truth. The titular act—precarious, performative, and faintly heroic—becomes a metaphor for modern life’s demand to appear composed while courting failure. Shrigley’s deliberate naïveté heightens the visual punch, inviting laughter before revealing a quieter tension: the body as a site of effort, spectacle, and inevitable imbalance.
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...
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Contemporary Art • Hampstead, London
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