Jim Shaw

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.