Jessica Beck – författare

For over three decades, Jim Shaw has found inspiration in comics, pulp novels, album covers, and amateur paintings. His densely layered and humorous works span painting, drawing, and sculpture, and juxtapose images of friends, family, and dreams, with world events, pop culture, and alternative realities. Published to coincide with Thinking the Unthinkable (2023) in Beverly Hills, Shaw s first exhibition with Gagosian, this expansive and vibrantly illustrated catalogue delves into the secret histories of psychedelic therapy, Hollywood legend, and nuclear war themes that all coalesce in the artist s recent works. An essay by Gagosian director Jessica Beck discusses Shaw s hallucinogenic depictions of Cary Grant, Esther Williams, and Jeff Chandler. A conversation with author Rachel Kushner ranges from the artist s formative years to the early weaponization of LSD. In Jim Shaw Kills, new fiction written by Jonathan Lethem, a miniaturized version of Shaw is dispatched into the comatose body of an ex-president.

A tale of two Pop artists in 1960s New YorkThis book charts the emergence of Marisol Escobar (1930–2016) and Andy Warhol (1928–87) in New York during the dawn of Pop art in the early 1960s. Through essays, interviews and prose, the book explores the artists’ parallel rise to success, the formation of their artistic personas, their savvy navigation of gallery relationships and the blossoming of their early artistic practices from 1960 to 1968. The exhibition features key loans of Marisol’s work from major global collections, along with iconic works and rarely seen films and archival materials from the Andy Warhol Museum’s collection. By situating Marisol's work in dialogue with Warhol’s, this new collection of writing seeks to reclaim the importance of her art; reframe the strength, originality and daring nature of her work; and reconsider her as one of the leading figures of the Pop era.