Works Exhibited
About
What is the scariest monster of all time? Us humans.
—Jim Shaw
Gagosian is pleased to announce It’s After the End of the World, Don’t You Know That Yet, Jim Shaw’s first exhibition at the gallery in London, opening at 17–19 Davies Street on April 11, 2024.
Shaw dives headlong into the maelstrom of American society in paintings, drawings, and sculptures inspired by comic books, pulp novels, album covers, and protest posters—as well as by amateur art. His works depict world events, pop-cultural phenomena, and alternative, quasi-mystical realities. Shaw has also turned to his own life—particularly his unconscious mind—as a source of surreal imagery.
In Never the Twain Shall Meet (2023), Shaw depicts a collision between, in his words, “a severely perky ad for TWA and a jingoistic editorial cartoon about how typical Americans are forced to uphold a backward world.” Unveiling (2023) derives from the artist’s interest in the aesthetics of cartoons and propaganda images from the era of his birth—a period during which print advertising exhibited a notable lack of self-awareness. Here, a Folies Bergère dancer assumes the status of earth goddess while characters by New Yorker cartoonist Richard Taylor populate the rest of the image.
Arrive Without Traveling (2023) depicts airplane passengers interrupted by a floating map of the United States emblazoned with a man’s forehead and shades. Seeming to promote some higher truth, it is actually, according to Shaw, derived from a magazine ad that illustrates a national shipping network.
#JimShaw
Davies Street, London
17–19 Davies Street
London W1K 3DE
+44 20 7493 3020
london@gagosian.com
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 10–6
Press
Gagosian
press@gagosian.com
Toby Kidd
tkidd@gagosian.com
+44 20 7495 1500
Bolton & Quinn
Sylvia Ross
sylvia@boltonquinn.com
+44 20 7221 5000
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2023
The Spring 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Roe Ethridge’s Two Kittens with Yarn Ball (2017–22) on its cover.
“The Present Decline”: Jim Shaw’s Epic Parables
Catherine Taft examines Jim Shaw’s visionary work, which probes the American psyche through political, historical, and cultural allegory.
Shortlist
Shaw Studio Sing-along Songs
In this Shortlist series we invite artists and writers to tell us about works of art, literature, film, or music that have influenced their work or are at the forefront of their minds today. Here Jim Shaw shares a selection of songs he listens to while working, from new discoveries to childhood staples. Shaw writes of the balance between delight and regret, hope and gloom in his playlist.
A Perfect Storm: Jim Shaw and Conspiratorial Film
In the fall of 2021, in partnership with New York’s Metrograph cinema and Gagosian, Jim Shaw organized a series of six conspiracy-minded films revolving around thorny questions of truth, guilt, fantasy, and innocence, and leading Shaw to revelations about the fringe notion of “frazzledrip.” Here, Natasha Stagg reflects on the movies he chose and on the wider implications of what it means to go down the rabbit hole.
