David Shrigley dines out on his designs for Sketch

David Shrigley has turned an entire restaurant into his canvas for his biggest exhibition of original drawings yet.

The artist, 45, has also created a set of more than 20 pieces of dinnerware for Sketch, in Mayfair, which was previously transformed by Martin Creed.

The jugs, salt cellars and plates will be available to buy — with proceeds going to charity, to try to stop diners stealing. “It will be the first artwork that I have made that can go in the dishwasher,” said Shrigley. “It will be very clean artwork. Clean artwork is good artwork, in my opinion.”

The 239 drawings for the restaurants took six weeks to complete and cover Shrigley’s favourite subjects of life and death — with nods to the culinary setting.

“People are free to ignore the artwork and just focus on the food if they like,” said Shrigley, who gets to dine in “his” restaurant for the coming year. He added that another advantage of working in a restaurant was that “you get fed better”, saying: “You get given cakes while you’re doing the installation.”

Richard Nicoll has designed the uniforms for staff — T-shirt dresses for the women and grey boiler-suits for the men.

Restaurant proprietor Mourad Mazouz said: “The beautiful collision of art and design, humour and finesse, is exactly what we want to bring to our guests.”