It's a beautiful celebration of women's practice and the matrilineal knowledge transfer that takes place in western Arnhem Land, through weaving: the passing down of stories; the passing down of techniques; the passing down of the magical recipes that go into creating the beautiful dyes," says Russell-Cook. The reason he now “delegates” the selection of his art for books or exhibitions is, he says, that his own choice never seemed to match what people want: “The gallery would send me an inventory of all the works that were unsold and I would look at them and think: ‘I can’t believe that that painting didn’t sell. I can’t believe that that one didn’t sell … That’s brilliant, that one!’ Things that were just perfect, that represented everything I wanted to say about my existence – and the meaning, and irony thereof. But did anybody agree with me? No. No. They just wanted the ones of the cat.”

David Shrigley Calendar 2023 - Librairie sans titre David Shrigley Calendar 2023 - Librairie sans titre

Textiles are the stars of this Triennial: Another major new commission is a 40-metre-long tapestry by Mexican product designer Fernando Laposse, who works with Indigenous artisans and materials such as sisal and corn leaves. Yet my morbid desire to find the darkness in this happy character is gratified when he does finally admit to a more hidden, personal drive to his art. Featuring more than 100 artists, and free to the public, the exhibition will take over the entire NGV International building — including the facade, which will feature a large text-based work by Ono, in the form of a question for Melburnians. It’s not like he is trapped in the English countryside either. He frequently visits Copenhagen where he has the Shrig Shop (inspired by Keith Haring’s Pop Shop), which, even though it’s “around the corner and up the alley”, acts as the physical focus of his online business. I can’t help asking if he has sampled Copenhagen’s food scene. It turns out the legendary restaurant Noma gives departing staff a Shrigley print – and in return he gets free meals there. Yes, he confirms, it is as good as people say.

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Inspired by fish traps common to the area, Mun-dirra will be presented in a maze-like formation, through which audiences can walk. Your attitude was: what am I going to paint right now? Dinosaur. So you paint the Tyrannosaurus rex, and then you attach some text to the image of the Tyrannosaurus rex, and usually the Tyrannosaurus rex is saying something either violent or stupid. And that’s what I did when I was five. In my mind, it’s a similar format and attitude, albeit now I’m a middle-aged man who’s read some books and stuff. Inevitably, there is some craft that seeps in there but the work isn’t going to be any better if I could draw.” Part of the joy of doing it is the therapeutic thing: I guess I’m quite an anxious person at different times. Whilst I say I’m a pretty happy person, I’m also an introvert, and introverts often tend to be quite anxious, I think. I worry about stuff – I worry that I’ve upset people and I worry about things that are irrational. So I guess that’s the thing that I grapple with in my life, in terms of my emotional makeup, that’s something I have to deal with. I mean, I’m not a depressed person, but I think I am quite an anxious person. And a lot of the work just has this insane anxiety about it.” When I’m seeing how word and image fit together – which is my thing, right? – it’s a bit like a child learning how to speak.” Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp: they were the artists I wanted to be. It was the otherness of that thought process

David Shrigley Calendar 2023 – Oink Gallery

The instigator of the project, US-based Polish artist Agnieszka Pilat, says robots aren't coming for our art just yet. While the dogs use AI to operate within their surroundings, their creative capacity is limited: "I'm very directly telling the robot what to do and how to operate. A trio of finger-painting robotic dogs will share star billing with conceptual artist Yoko Ono, iconic fashion house Schiaparelli and British art heavyweight Tracey Emin in the third iteration of NGV Triennial, the National Gallery of Victoria's behemoth exhibition of contemporary international art and design, opening in December. It is, in fact, a bit like being a child for ever. He sees a real analogy between what he does now and the paintings he made on sugar paper when he was five years old. When he says he still paints as he did aged five, he doesn’t only mean he has avoided being ruined by craft skills. He is also referring to the “stupid or violent” words he would put in the creature’s mouth. It is quite hard to define the essence of Shrigley’s art – until you visit his studio and realise he draws and paints all day long. Everything else is just about distributing the results – including in books. To my surprise, he didn’t edit Get Your Shit Together himself or select its images: even its title was chosen by the publisher. “Shit” wasn’t a word he expected a US publisher to put on the cover.

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There's a lot of anxiety about AI and robotics, and I want to show that actually in human years, these robots are young children, and they're silly," Pilat says, likening the dogs' work to a child's finger painting. Shrigley prefers to point to the formal structure of his work, and the philosophical humour it embodies. He likes to think he has a lot in common with a friend, the conceptual artist Martin Creed. Imitating him, he puts on a deliberately bad Scottish accent: “Aye, so I’ve got this hat, right, and it’s a square hat because hats aren’t square most of the time. And that’s why I wear the square hat.” He is clearly someone with good reasons to be content. Yet Shrigley’s deepest happiness appears to lie in his creativity. His drawing and painting skills are, he freely confesses, “limited”. But he loves making his marks on paper, can’t stop doing it, and has organised his life so he can sit here undisturbed, drawing and painting away.

David Shrigley 2023 Wall Calendar | Paper Tiger

Shrigley’s Really Good, installed on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square in September 2016. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian Yet the art world loves him too. He was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 2013, causing perhaps the competition’s last real scandal, with a naked urinating statue. There's quite a lot [of works] in the show around plants, trees, and the more-than-human world view," says Ewan McEoin, NGV's senior curator of contemporary art, design and architecture.Inside the gallery, three robo-dogs — designed by Boston Dynamics for industrial applications such as data collection, and subsequently trialled, controversially, in law enforcement — will take up residence in a purpose-built art studio, where they will paint every day for the duration of the Triennial.

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So, now, he lets other people riffle through his art and choose what they want to publish or exhibit. Including the cats.