David Shrigley, Everyone Likes Colourful Shit, 2012

Everyone Likes Colourful Shit (2012) – David Shrigley Screenprint

About the Work

Everyone Likes Colourful Shit (2012) is a striking David Shrigley screenprint that immediately arrests the eye with its vibrant concentric rings of saturated colour. Set against a clean background, these hand-drawn circular bands of yellow, pink, blue, green, and red radiate outwards around the central, hand-rendered text. This deliberate juxtaposition of crude geometry and brilliant pigments exemplifies the artist's play with raw visual immediacy.

By overlaying the composition with his signature capitalised handwriting, Shrigley delivers a biting, meta-conceptual critique of contemporary art consumption and aesthetic simplification. The work embraces a joyful absurdity, simultaneously mock-celebrating and subverting the viewer's basic desire for sensory stimulation and bright decoration. This tension between high-concept satire and simple visual pleasure elevates the print beyond mere caricature.

David Shrigley

Celebrated for his dark humour and deceptively simple line drawings, David Shrigley has secured an enduring position within the British contemporary art canon. His notable accolades include a nomination for the prestigious Turner Prize in 2013 and the high-profile commission for the Fourth Plinth in London's Trafalgar Square. His work is held in prestigious public institutions worldwide, including Tate and the British Council.

The transition from quick, spontaneous ink drawings to the formal constraints of printmaking allows his subversive messages to reach a wider audience without losing their immediate, visceral quality. Each David Shrigley print acts as a cultural mirror, exposing the anxieties and mundane ironies of modern existence through distilled graphic forms. This translation of low-fidelity aesthetics into high-quality editions has become a defining aspect of his creative output.

Screenprint Process

Utilising heavy, acid-free Somerset paper, the production of this screenprint prioritises tactile depth and long-term stability. The screenprinting technique allows for a remarkably thick deposit of rich, oil-based inks, resulting in an intense colour saturation that cannot be replicated by digital processes. These velvety layers of pigment are applied sequentially, ensuring that each hand-drawn ring possesses an incredibly rich and matte physical presence.

This demanding process perfectly captures the intentional imperfections of the original drawing, preserving every wobble of the line and slight variation in ink density. Published by Jealous Gallery, this David Shrigley limited edition print demonstrates a masterful control of colour registration that respects the artist's characteristically loose hand. The collaboration between artist and print studio results in a finished work that is both technically precise and visually unrefined.

Collectability

As demand for the artist's classic graphic works continues to grow, early prints featuring his most iconic textual statements remain highly sought after. Works containing direct, self-referential jokes about the nature of art collecting draw particularly strong collector interest from both established and emerging contemporary art patrons. The bold, declarative nature of this composition ensures it stands out as an archetype of his wider artistic philosophy.

Representing an important text piece from his highly active 2012 publishing period, the piece remains a particularly desirable example of Shrigley's printmaking practice. With a small edition size of just 100, copies of Everyone Likes Colourful Shit rarely appear on the secondary market. The enduring appeal of this specific composition reflects its status as one of the most direct and celebrated statements in his graphic oeuvre.