David Shrigley: Brain Activity - review

"Do you remember those days," says a smoky, film-noir voice, over lounge jazz, "when we would copulate whenever we liked, and defecate wherever we chose?" It's a great stage setter for this exhibition. The Glasgow-based artist has clearly watched a lot of nature documentaries but like everything else he experiences, it seems, he cannot escape their absurdity.

Shrigley's drawings, paintings, sculpture and animations often look as if they are thrashed out in seconds yet reflect a precisely honed aesthetic. The drawings - his purest and best form of expression - are awkward in line and accompanied by a childlike scrawl, a style whose skewedness immaculately matches his abject thoughts. In one, the crudest of human figures lies on a table.

"Even on the mortuary slab you still make me laugh," says the accompanying text. In another, a figure, just a head with limbs, parachutes over prosaic wavy lines - "Oh no! It's the ocean!" he exclaims, the amusing horror of his predicament captured in the lines of his face.

Shrigley's animations feature a similarly terrific economy of expression. One addictive film features a die which refuses to land on anything but one, however vigorously it is shaken. When Shrigley turns to sculpture, he seems less able to conjure a whole world, so the results are more uneven. A tiny stick figure standing alone on the Hayward's roof terrace, dwarfed by spectacular views, is brilliantly pathetic but a sculpture with similar figures having sex on a car bonnet misses the mark. In painting, too, Shrigley is less effective - colour and brushwork seem to dilute the ideas' purity.

On the whole this is a wonderful show. Shrigley's works are silly, scrappy, hilarious, often macabre, but more often than not they possess a profundity and wisdom many artists crave.

Until May 13 (020 7960 4200, outhbankcentre.co.uk)

David Shrigley