Events
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
Announcements
New Representation
Jim Shaw
Gagosien is pleased to announce the representation of Jim Shaw. Since the 1970s, Shaw has mined the dreams and conflicted realities of American culture, finding inspiration in comic books, pulp novels, rock albums, protest posters, and thrift store paintings. Blending the personal, the commonplace, and the uncanny, Shaw’s works frequently place in dialogue images of friends and family with world events, pop culture, and alternate realities, often unfolding in long-term narrative cycles.
Download the full press release (pdf)
Jim Shaw. Photo: LeeAnn Nickels
Museum Exhibitions
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Jim Shaw
The End Is Here
October 7, 2015–January 10, 2016
New Museum, New York
www.newmuseum.org
The End Is Here presents some of Jim Shaw’s most iconic projects and reveals the breadth and inventiveness of his art. A comprehensive selection of his works is exhibited alongside objects from his collections of vernacular art and religious didactic materials. These instantly recognizable artworks and series—which succeed in reinvigorating and complicating traditional categories such as portraiture, history painting, figuration, and abstraction—have never before been brought together in a single exhibition.
Installation view, Jim Shaw: The End Is Here, New Museum, New York, October 7, 2015–January 10, 2016. Artwork © Jim Shaw. Photo: Maris Hutchinson