Jim Shaw: Drawings
JIM SHAW Drawings, 2025, installation view Artwork © Jim Shaw Photo: Maris Hutchinson Courtesy Gagosian
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
NEW YORK, Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of drawings by Jim Shaw at Park & 75, New York. Made between 2012 and 2024, the works find the artist continuing his journey through the maelstrom of American society, taking inspiration from such sources as vintage advertisements and borrowing from the aesthetics of comic books and album covers. They feature images of complex forms such as trees and hair; references to popular culture and counterculture; surreal representations of the artist’s dreams; and allusions to bizarre religious cults and political conspiracies.
JIM SHAW Study for "Rinse Cycle", 2012 Gouache on paper 20 x 20 1/2 inches (50.8 x 52.1 cm) © Jim Shaw Photo: Ed Mumford Courtesy Gagosian
In the works on view Shaw details scenarios from the domestic to the fantastical, often combining elements of both. “Most of these drawings,” he explains, “involve nostalgia for advertising images from a period when the single image was staged and fetishized.” Study for “Rinse Cycle” (2012)—one of two works in color in the exhibition—was derived from a 1950s washing machine ad and portrays the wraithlike abstracted forms of clothing dancing around a central agitator.A number of drawings feature trees. Study for “God Didn’t Make the Little Green Apples” (2023) originated in a visit that Shaw made to Kentucky, where he noticed a tree in the same “pose” as 1940s photograph of a woman performing, in the artist’s words, a “Spanish Dance.” Study for “Spinning Man and the Tower” (2023) presents another fusion of human and plant; in this case, the pose of the former is derived from Shaw’s characteristically weird dream image of a man in a church being lifted aloft by an octopus. And images of hair crop up in works such as Study for “Sweater Couple” (2017), which concocts a 1960s-style promotion featuring a man and his Nancy Sinatra–esque partner clad in matching jumpers that finally merge with one another in a wiglike mass of curls.
JIM SHAW Study for "The Bride Stripped Bare", 2016 Pencil on paper 24 x 19 inches (61 x 48.3 cm) © Jim Shaw Photo: Ed Mumford Courtesy Gagosian
Finally, several works see Shaw explore a fascination with the relationship between written language and psychedelic aesthetics. Study for “The Souls of Aliens” (2024), for example, was sparked by a dream in which a cross between one of Edgar Degas’s young dancers and a figure by Dutch painter Jan Toorop appears within a sinuous swirl of lettering.
Jim Shaw, Study for "God Didn't Make the Little Green Apples", 2023, Pencil on paper, 24 x 19 inches (61 x 48.3 cm) © Jim Shaw Photo: Ed Mumford Courtesy Gagosian
The artist was in conversation with Tony Oursler at the gallery on Saturday, May 3, at 3pm. Moderated by Gagosian director Jessica Beck, the conversation will focus on Shaw’s practice of dream drawing and on drawing in general as a consistent aspect of his work, the two artists’ shared interest in spiritual and religious histories and propaganda, and their time as students at CalArts in the late 1970s
For Jim Shaw’s biographical information and exhibition history, please visit here. For more information about the artists represented by Gagosian and other exhibitions at the gallery, please visit the gallery’s site here. The gallery can also be found on Pinterest, X, YouTube, Facebook,Instagram, and Artsy.
