Artist Spotlight
Since the 1970s, Jim Shaw has responded to American cultural history through painting, drawing, and sculpture. He draws from sources as wide-ranging as comic books, pulp novels, rock albums, protest posters, and amateur paintings. Often unfolding in extended narrative cycles, Shaw’s works juxtapose images of friends and family with those depicting world events, pop-cultural phenomena, and alternative realities, blending the personal, the commonplace, and the visionary.
Launched in 2020, Artist Spotlight is presented once a month as a regular part of the gallery’s programming. Each Artist Spotlight highlights a work by an individual artist—made available exclusively online for forty-eight hours—together with new editorial features and selected archival content.
Artist Spotlight: Jim Shaw features a new painting by the artist. For more information, please contact the gallery at collecting@gagosian.com.
#GagosianSpotlight
Photo: LeeAnn Nickel
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.
Related News
Screening and Talk
Jim Shaw’s Monsters
Sunday, July 23, 2023, 2–9pm
Brain Dead Studios, Los Angeles
studios.wearebraindead.com
In collaboration with Kaleidoscope, Jim Shaw has curated a film program titled Monsters to celebrate his cover story in the spring/summer 2023 issue of the magazine. Held at Brain Dead Studios—an experiential space hosted in a former silent movie theater—this spine-chilling program stems directly from the artist’s childhood memories, featuring three horror movies that embrace the surreal, the sci-fi, and the supernatural. To kick off the screenings, Shaw will be in conversation with Gagosian director Jessica Beck to discuss his recent paintings, which reanimate mythological themes through incidents from political history and popular entertainment. The works were shown at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, and will be documented in an exhibition catalogue featuring an essay by Beck to be published in August 2023. The event is free to attend.
2pm: Jim Shaw in conversation with Jessica Beck
3pm: The Electronic Monster (1958), directed by Montgomery Tully
5pm: The Mask (1961), directed by Julian Roffman
7pm: 13 Ghosts (1960), directed by William Castle
Jim Shaw. Photo: Max Farago
Installation
Jim Shaw
February 15–March 26, 2022
Gagosian, Beverly Hills
In anticipation of his first solo exhibition at the gallery in 2023, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, is pleased to present a selection of works by Jim Shaw, who joined the gallery in 2021. The wide sampling of works on view comprises paintings, drawings, and sculpture that typify the artist’s exploration of the connections between his own psyche and America’s larger political, social, and spiritual histories. These include entries from Shaw’s series Dream Drawings (1992–99), which presents uncanny scenes derived from the artist’s own dream life, and Dream Objects (1994–), which manifests selected items from these nocturnal visions as bizarre, cartoonlike sculptures.
Jim Shaw, Family Stories, 2019 © Jim Shaw
Screening
Jim Shaw Selects
October 12–27, 2021
Metrograph, New York
metrograph.com
Jim Shaw is presenting a selection of conspiracy-minded cinema at Metrograph in New York, inaugurating a new artist-programmer-in-residence series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph in the theater and online. Jim Shaw Selects will feature six films that kept the artist uneasy company during the paranoiac pandemic time. To attend a screening, purchase tickets at metrograph.com.
Still from They Live (1988), directed by John Carpenter
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Jim Shaw
The Ties That Bind
Through May 19, 2024
Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium
www.muhka.be
The Ties That Bind explores Jim Shaw’s work from the last five decades, which has at once anticipated and mirrored shifts in the American cultural and political landscape during this period. In recent decades, the artist’s work has increasingly highlighted the growing tension between conservative and progressive ideologies. The exhibition presents drawings, paintings, photographs, and immersive installations that bring to light the core motifs of Shaw’s practice.
Installation view, Jim Shaw: The Ties That Bind, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium, February 9–May 19, 2024. Artwork © Jim Shaw. Photo: Kristien Daem
On View
Janus
Through November 24, 2024
Palazzo Diedo, Venice
berggruenarts.org
Janus, appropriately titled after the Roman god of beginnings, is the inaugural exhibition at Palazzo Diedo, a new contemporary arts space in Venice established by Berggruen Arts & Culture. For the exhibition, curated by Mario Codognato, eleven international artists—Urs Fischer, Piero Golia, Carsten Höller, Liu We, Ibrahim Mahama, Mariko Mori, Sterling Ruby, Jim Shaw, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Aya Takano, and Lee Ufan—have conceived site-specific interventions in response to the architecture and original features of the eighteenth-century building designed by the acclaimed Venetian architect Andrea Tirali. The Polaroid Foundation has also contributed a special project that invites the participating artists to create an original work using the Polaroid 20×24, the world’s largest instant camera.
Jim Shaw, The Alexander Romances, 2024 (detail) © Jim Shaw. Photo: Jeff McLane
Closed
Ecstatic
Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection
June 10–August 27, 2023
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
hammer.ucla.edu
Presented in conjunction with the unveiling of the Hammer’s building expansion, Ecstatic highlights acquisitions made since 2005—the year the institution began collecting contemporary art. The exhibition is organized around two distinct installations of sculpture and works on paper that emphasize the role each medium plays within the scope of the museum’s collection. Work by Mark Grotjahn, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Jim Shaw is included.
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Someday, 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles © Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Photo: Jeff McLane
Closed
Hippydrome
April 30–September 4, 2022
Frac Normandie Caen, France
www.fracnormandiecaen.fr
This exhibition brings together a selection of “interior landscapes” and portraits of the world in miniature that share an eccentric or fantastic sensibility, loosely linking them to Surrealism. Work by Jim Shaw and Blair Thurman is included.
Jim Shaw, Anatomy Weird-ohs (Can opener; Blake-St. Sebastian Crystal & Fish Face), 2011, Frac Normandie Caen, France © Jim Shaw. Photo: Clérin-Morin Photographie