Praz-Delavallade Paris is pleased to present Jim Shaw 's new solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from 24 February to 13 April.
Iconic figure of the Californian art scene, Jim Shaw shares with Mike Kelley, and later with Paul McCarthy, the same desire to produce art that explores American society. In 1973, Jim Shaw and Mike Kelley formed the influential punk group Destroy all Monsters, aiming to produce art that explored the schizophrenic side of a society they saw as conformist, standardised and in decline. Early on, Jim Shaw's works were made of heterogeneous sources, of personal histories and collective cultural history. While many of them appear to be a result of dreamlike hallucinations, they remain far from European surrealism.
Jim Shaw's more recent work is teeming with grotesque, delinquent figures that evoke the history of America sick with bulimia and excess. Jim Shaw depicts America in its rawest form which witnesses Uncle Sam poisoned by Kremlin devils, Nixon's dog named Checkers, Brett Kavanaugh accused of rape and appointed to the Supreme Court by Trump. Shaw exposes the turpitudes of politics and the damage caused by some multinational corporations' greed. And yet, although these works are animated by the most satirical impulse, it is not 'political' art. This is not 'AgitProp'—the creation of a committed ideological community around a form or idea. Jim Shaw's historical models are singularly anachronistic. We flirt with history painting, as it was practiced at the end of the 19th century and which combined discursive tools with devices for producing allegorical images.
Hieronymus Bosch's nightmarish visions—hermetic and cryptic—are another even more ancient referent, whose intentions remain subject to the most contradictory interpretations today, more than half a millennium after their creation. Although Shaw's references remain unknown to many observers of contemporary art, they nevertheless belong to a field that by definition is open to all and which is everyday popular culture. In this way, Jim participates in the development of his generation, notably with the critique of the status of the author and, consequently, the loss of the work's aura. In the profusion of images created or collected by the artist, the viewer is thrown back into the uneasy condition of ideological arbiter.
Shaw usually works with large-scale bodies of work. For example, My Mirage (1986-1991), a vast biographical fiction about a character named Billy, includes some 170 pieces. Since 1992, Shaw has been transcribing his dreams into drawings (Dream Drawings) and sculpting artworks that appear to him in his sleep (Dream Objects).
The Thrift Store is a living work regularly supplemented with new additions of works found in second-hand stores. Another example of his work: the unmissable Distorted Faces and the ex-nihilo creation of 'the O-ism' a religion straight from his imagination, that he codifies as the Grand Master of the order. It's a deep dive into the roots of North American ideology, through a multitude of installations, paintings, videos and drawings meant to represent and describe it. A vast recycling enterprise that anarchically embodies the obsessions, neuroses and collective values of post-war America. From then on, Jim Shaw never ceased to expose the failings and deviancies of this culture, not only by explicitly criticising it, but also by staging it in nightmarish situations.
Profoundly erudite as well as anti-authoritarian, Jim Shaw's works have continued to embody a strange beauty for over 50 years. This exhibition is part of Praz-Delavallade's tribute to this great artist, celebrating 26 years of collaboration by devoting a retrospective exhibition to him, featuring works from various series spanning the period 1975 to 2019.
Press release courtesy Praz-Delavallade.
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