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.
#GagosienSpotlight
Photo: LeeAnn Nickel
Now available
Gagosien Quarterly Spring 2023
The Spring 2023 issue of Gagosien 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 Gagosien, 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 Gagosien 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 Gagosien, 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
Gagosien, Beverly Hills
In anticipation of his first solo exhibition at the gallery in 2023, Gagosien, 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 Gagosien 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
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
Closed
Des corps, des écritures
Regards sur l’art d’aujourd’hui
April 20–August 28, 2022
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris
www.mam.paris.fr
This exhibition, whose title translates to Bodies, Writings: A Look at Today’s Art, highlights a selection of artworks created between 1973 and 2022 that were recently acquired by the museum. The works on view explore two distinct but organically linked themes: writing as a form or expression, resistance, or testimony; and the body and its representation, particularly in the context of societal changes. Work by Ewa Juszkiewicz and Jim Shaw is included.
Installation view, Des corps, des écritures: Regards sur l’art d’aujourd’hui, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, April 20–August 28, 2022. Artwork, left to right: © Guillaume Maraud, © Jim Shaw. Photo: © Pierre Antoine
Closed
Michigan Stories
Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw
November 18, 2017–February 25, 2018
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing
broadmuseum.msu.edu
Against the backdrop of 1960s counterculture, Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw shared a lifelong friendship and common background: an upbringing and education in the state of Michigan. Michigan Stories is the first exhibition to place these artists’ practices alongside each other in historical context, approaching their work as parallel visual meditations on the vernacular cultures—including religious and secular rituals, folk tropes, zines, comic books, secret societies, and conspiracy theories—native to their midwestern upbringing.
Installation view, Michigan Stories: Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing, November 18, 2017–February 25, 2018. Artwork © Destroy All Monsters Collective (Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Jim Shaw). Photo: Eat Pomegranate Photography, courtesy MSU Broad Art Museum