Jim Shaw

FORTHCOMING & NEW RELEASES

JIM SHAW: THE RINSE CYCLE
WALTHER KöNIG, KöLN
ISBN: 9783863352776 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 3/31/2013
Active | In stock

ACTIVE BACKLIST

JIM SHAW: MY MIRAGE
Edited by Lionel Bovier, Fabrice Stroun. Text by Fabrice Stroun.
JRP|RINGIER
ISBN: 9783037641873 | US $55.00
Pub Date: 10/31/2011
Active | In stock

JIM SHAW: DISTORTED FACES AND PORTRAITS, 1978-2007
Edited by Marc Blondeau, Lionel Bovier, Philippe Davet. Text by Alison M. Gingeras.
JRP|RINGIER
ISBN: 9783905701135 | US $39.99
Pub Date: 12/15/2007
Active | In stock

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

JIM SHAW: O
JRP|RINGIER/LEMAGASIN
ISBN: 9782940271351 | US $35.00
Pub Date: 8/15/2005
Out of print | Not available

Jim Shaw

Jim Shaw: The Rinse Cycle

Edited by Laurence Sillars. Text by Anne Carson, Robert Currie. Interview by Tony Oursler, Laurence Sillars, Darcey Steinke, John C. Welchman.
Published by Walther König, Köln

A superb draughtsman, painter and sculptor, bricoleur of invented religions and cultures, collector of thrift-store paintings and aficionado of middle-brow psychedelic and surrealist art: Jim Shaw (born 1952) is one of America’s most important and prolific contemporary artists. Following his years in the protopunk band Destroy All Monsters (which he cofounded, with Mike Kelley among others), Shaw came to prominence in the Los Angeles art world of the late 1970s, as part of a generation graduating from Cal Arts, among them Mike Kelley, John Miller and Tony Oursler. Shaw has produced many handsome project-based books over the course of his ever-evolving career, but The Rinse Cycle is, incredibly, his first ever full-scale survey. It brings together more than 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings and videos from the last 25 years, a superb introduction to a quintessential American artist.

Jim Shaw: My Mirage

Edited by Lionel Bovier, Fabrice Stroun. Text by Fabrice Stroun.
Published by JRP|Ringier

A bricoleur of uniquely American utopian/dystopian cosmologies, Jim Shaw (born 1952) weds themes from American religious history with motifs from 1960s and 70s counterculture, often coining rubrics--such as his invented religion of O--or series under which to unify these narratives. My Mirage is Shaw's earliest sequence of this kind. Conceived between 1986 and 1991, arranged in chapters and constituted of nearly 170 works--drawn, silk-screened, photographed, sculpted, filmed or painted in a different style--My Mirage recounts the wanderings of Billy, a white, middle-class American sucked into the whirlwind of the 1960s and 70s counterculture. An anxious and withdrawn youth consumed by psychotic hallucinations, Billy joins a psychedelic pagan cult, eventually and inevitably returning to the religion of his youth, “reborn” as a fundamentalist Christian. Shaw's broad iconography for this visual bildungsroman ranges from children's books to contemporary art, religious literature and psychedelic poster art, all juxtaposed en face--one image per page--to relay an associative narrative progression. From the start, the project was intended for the book format as its ideal incarnation, and this edition was therefore created in close collaboration with the artist. My Mirage offers one of Shaw's most concise statements on vernacular culture and the wild polarities of religious life in postwar America.

Jim Shaw: Distorted Faces and Portraits, 1978-2007

Edited by Marc Blondeau, Lionel Bovier, Philippe Davet. Text by Alison M. Gingeras.
Published by JRP|Ringier

Almost 16 inches tall and 12 inches wide and jacketed in a 53 x 37-inch foldout poster of Jim Shaw's deeply disturbing black-and-white oil painting of Ronald Reagan's distorted face (layered with smaller, ghostlike figures of American violence like Charles Manson and Rambo), this darkly riveting limited-edition artist's book contains works from five series of portraits made over the course of the artist's four-decade-long career: the Distorted Faces drawings (1978-85) and paintings (1986-2007); the Noir portraits of 1978; the sketches for Shaw's Giant Face paintings (1992) and other assorted faces from 1993-2006. The format and print quality of this one-of-a-kind publication truly allow Shaw's legendary graphic abilities to shine--particularly in the hyperreal Distorted Faces series. According to Alison M. Gingeras' catalogue essay, "The jingle-like language of Pop has been transformed into rambling, run-on sentences that describe fragmented ideas, associative thoughts and schizophrenic images. Too strange, too perverse, too lurid, too precise: Shaw is an elusive character that defies categorization."

Jim Shaw: O

Edited by Lionel Bovier and Fabrice Stroun. Essays by Yves Aupetitallot, Doug Harvey and Nadia Schneider.
Published by JRP|Ringier/LeMAGASIN

It's a particularly American notion: If you don't like your religion, invent one of your own. That's exactly what Jim Shaw has done. This publication is dedicated to full documentation of this new body of work, developed since 2001 in installations, paintings, video, and drawings, concerning Oism, the religion that Shaw provides with a back story to the mid-19th century. As Shaw describes it: "Oism's beliefs included the notion of a female deity, of time going backwards, spiritual transience, and a prohibition on figurative art." Shaw's Oist-inspired works include a series of abstract paintings presented as the work of the Adam O. Goodman, an Oist painter, along with his archives of "forbidden" figurative imagery; The Donner Party, supposedly by Oist artist Mandy Omaha, a dead-on spit-take of Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, only with cannibalistic treats at the place settings; and movie poster paintings announcing hypothetical Oist epics. Funny and shocking, o adds yet another volume to Shaw's continuing investigation of American culture and its assumptions.