David Shrigley has unveiled a new show, ‘Exhibition of Old Rope’, featuring – quite literally – an enormous pile of old rope, sourced from seaports and other locations, which he has valued at £1 million. The show is on view at London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery until 20 December 2025.
‘Exhibition of Old Rope’ consists of ten tonnes of discarded rope – roughly 20 miles in length – intensively cleaned and piled high in the Mayfair gallery. Shrigley spent eight months collecting it from seaports, climbing schools, tree surgeons, offshore wind farms, scaffolders and shorelines around the country.
To be fair to Shrigley, he’s not seriously suggesting that the rope is worth £1 million. The price tag is deliberately provocative, literally embodying the idiom ‘money for old rope’. The Turner Prize-nominated artist is known for his deadpan, self-deprecating work, and the exhibition is intended as a commentary on the contemporary art market and the nature of artistic value.
That said, there may be some genuine artistic value to be found here. Much of the rope is made from synthetic polyester and nylon, materials notoriously difficult to recycle. In this respect, the exhibition addresses a pressing environmental concern – an estimated 640,000 tonnes of discarded fishing gear and marine rope enter the oceans each year – and explores the transformative potential of giving discarded materials a second life through art.
Shrigley’s work has long explored absurdity and humour, slyly questioning the arbitrariness of artistic value. In 2016, he created Really Good, a massive, brightly coloured sculpture spelling out these words. EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK (2003-2004) displayed this slightly unsettling reassurance on a billboard, while Brain Activity (2007) featured crude, childlike sketches depicting bizarre or frustrating human scenarios – people trying to squeeze toothpaste back into a tube, awkward social interactions and nonsensical mechanical inventions.
Piles of discarded materials have become something of a trope in conceptual art, and Shrigley’s work takes an established idea to its literal, ridiculous extreme.
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