David Shrigley's Newest Sculpture in Central Park

David Shrigley's Newest Sculpture in Central Park
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On September 8, Public Art Fund will present a new public artwork by David Shrigley. MEMORIAL, a granite sculpture commissioned for Doris C. Freedman Plaza, will stand 17-feet-tall with a shopping list engraved on its surface.

Shrigley's 2008 piece, Gravestone, featured a similar tombstone with a grocery list in gold-leaf letters. MEMORIAL expands on this concept through a combination of text and visual representation, playing on the significance of the monument to both the viewer and the audience as a whole.

"Public monuments are familiar features of parks and plazas across the world and enable communities to celebrate, remember, or pay homage to great endeavors or individuals. InMEMORIAL, however, David has chosen to celebrate one of the most familiar acts in many of our daily lives: the jotting down of a grocery list," said Public Art Fund Associate Curator Emma Enderby.

The work compares the boring, everyday act of writing a grocery list to the significance of a public memorial that celebrates a notable event or individual. Words like cereal, carrots and bread are extracted from their original context and displayed in a much different, symbolic environment.

According to Enderby, "A 2016 grocery list is different than one written just a few decades ago. Shrigley's list is contemporary, but would lose its relatability as time, people, and memory moves on. Its ephemerality, including the fact that it is often written on a scrap of paper or a smartphone, is in sharp contrast with Shrigley's selection of material--a solid slab of granite--on which to engrave these banal words. Read in sequence the list also forms a narrative, almost like a short nonsensical poem for our contemporary world."

MEMORIAL is on view from September 8, 2016 to February 26, 2017 and located at the corner of 60th Street and 5th Avenue.

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