David Shrigley, Exhbition of Old Rope, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Cork Steet, London, 13th November 2025 – Nuffin’ but a pile of old rope mate! Money for what? You’re having a giraffe. Opening night of the new David Shrigley show, and it really is a show, great big art show. the ongoing circus of it all, at the rather plush West End gaff of the global beast that is Stephen Friedman Gallery and all on a cold wet Cork Street on a November Thursday night (well the reflection of his orange neon looked good on the wet street if nothing else). Apparently he wants a million quid for his old rope, well that’s what’s made the headlines before hand, that tedious (macho?) thing about the price of art and my price tag it bigger than yours or just his mocking of it? Must admit, cynical smile aside, this one had me curious, I must admit I rather like the idea of a pile of old rope, and yes, I kind of wanted to see who would turn up on the opening night. Mostly I do rather like the idea of a pile of unwanted old rope in an art gallery and the questions that might ask, the points it might make, it wouldn’t be the first time it has been done but some people get more attention that others when they do this kind of thing (ditto the Brian Eno opening attended this evening just before this one).
Now I can’t claim to be much of a David Shrigley fan, not big on his whimsical world, his cynical humour or his often gloomy cartoons and drawings that A.I tells us are complemented by his dry captions, not much of a fan of that absurdity waiting in his artwork, dare I say I’ve always found his way and his wit rather tedious (there’s another view here in the Organ studio a voice that says he’s excellent and he always nails it, but that view isn’t banging on this keyboard). His work is rather hard to avoid if you spend time going to galleries or things like Frieze, it never has grabbed me, but hey, this looks like something different and well, off to Cork Street yet again…
“We are pleased to present David Shrigley’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery, Exhibition of Old Rope, marking over twenty-eight years of fruitful collaboration with the celebrated British artist. Expanding his conceptual practice, Shrigley showcases a 10-ton installation made entirely from discarded rope and a large-scale four-part neon”.
The first thing you notice, well if you grew up in a port town and a stones throw from the docks anyway, is that there’s no smell. Where’s the smell of salt water and diesel, bits of tar or oil, bits of dried out seaweed of bits of fish, where’s the seagull crap and the fishing line, it all looks and smells rather too clean, someone had a dirty job there…
Discussing the origins of this work, Shrigley explains: “This exhibition started with an idiom. Old rope has no use. It’s also hard to recycle, so there’s a lot of it lying around. I thought: what if I turn that into a literal exhibition of old rope. And then say, yes, this is art, and yes, you can buy it for £1 million.” He expands: “The work exists because I’m interested in the value people place on art, and the idiom gave me an excuse to explore that. I think £1 million is a fair price, partly because of the idea and partly because it is quite a lot of rope.”
And so the gallery is transformed with vast coiled mounds of reclaimed rope. “Demonstrating his caustic sense of humour, a huge bright orange neon hangs in the window with the exhibition title. Rendered in Shrigley’s distinctive handwriting, the neon adopts the aesthetic of a sign or advertisement as he humorously undermines its formal associations” and there you have it and there was I foolishly thinking it might be about the aesthetics of rope, the invitation to look at something in a formal space (I guess it still is), the colour, the texture, the rope-winding and the question of waste and how long is a piece of string anyway? But hey this is Shrigley and less a comment about discarded things and alas, more just a joke at the expense of the buy-anything art fools. Just his deadpan way? But hey, thing is, it looks great in this the plushest of high-end establishment West End galleries, as a piece of conceptual art to walk around and look at it just looks great. I guess that’s part of his thought process, his sarcastic mocking of us as we walk around these four very big heaps of rather satisfying rope in this big gallery, as we walk in reverential silence around the very satisfying piles of very very satisfying art, as we walk around his mocking of the art world in general. He really is having a bleedin’ giraffe and we’ll probably have a press release in a few days telling us the work has indeed sold but you know you can never trust these things and some insider will have “bought” it all and sent it off to a storage warehouse in Amsterdam or New York and bloody Hirst and his mates will enjoy the joke more than most and markets will be happy and Gagosian and the rest of them can carry on doing what they do as the business of high-end art dealing is propped up and on it all goes on. Anyone want to buy a Cynical Smile t-shirt? i think I still have a few around here.
So more art that’s about the value of art then, is it really actually nothing more than another rotten banana taped to a wall? I guess it really is about what you make of it and yes he is laughing at us as we walk around it, and yes the art world at this big end of things is obscene, it ridiculous, it is almost funny, and yes he’s laughing at the big money, taking the piss, he’ probably has ‘nailed it’, and at the same time there he is mocking me, laughing at me, laughing at me for coming out on a cold wet Thursday night to walk around his piles of old rope.
Thing is, I really liked it, I really enjoyed walking around it, looking at it, considering it, the layers of rope piled on more pieces of rope, the texture, the weathered colour, the reverence of it all, the visual threads rather than the conceptual ones, the history in each piece, the hands that have pulled on that now unwanted piece of rope, the (accidental) comments about how we waste so much, it could have been piles of rope, it could have been bits of wood picked up off the street to paint leaves on, it is a lot more than just piles of cleaned up odourless rope, I like it. I guess I missed the point, I guess is was all just about money for old rope and him having a giraffe…
Oh and there’s Shrigley’s neon reflecting in window of Brandon Ndife’s excellent Palimpsests exhibition, currently on show at London’s Holtermann Fine Art, a exhibtion of piece of art made from unwanted disguarded bits of old furniture picked up of the street, make ofthat what you will. (sw)
Stephen Friedman Gallery is at 5–6 Cork Street, London, W1S 3LQ. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am until 6pm (11am to 5pm on Saturdays). The David Shrigley exhibition is on until December 20th 2025.
Previously…
More Stephen Friedman Gallery coverage
As always go click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the slide show…
THE ORGAN 
One response to “ORGAN THING: David Shrigley’s Exhibition of Old Rope at London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery. Is he doing anything more than just having a laugh at art’s expense?”
[…] week, another Five Art Things thing, That’s David Shrigley’s Exhibition of Old Rope at London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery up there. Is he doi… We are in the body of something of other now, well, we’re not really surely the time has come to […]