Jim Shaw – författare

Thinking the Unthinkable documents Jim Shaw’s inaugural exhibition with Gagosian and features an essay by Jessica Beck, new fiction from Jonathan Lethem, and a conversation between the artist and Rachel Kushner.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.

Growing up in Richmond, Virginia, I was surrounded by family. My grandmother, several aunts, and an uncle lived on both sides of our house. The eldest of two sons, I had an idyllic childhood; my parents and younger brother were loving, and I was blessed with good health, high academic performance, and athletic abilities that allowed me to excel in high school football and track.

142 drawings realized over a decade, addressing the commitments, obsessions, and conceptual territories that drive Jim Shaw's practice.Since the late 1970s, Jim Shaw has developed a rich and multifaceted body of work that includes photographs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, films, and musical performances. The publication The Ties That Bind addresses the commitments, obsessions, and conceptual territories that drive Jim Shaw's practice: morality, fictional narratives, conspiracy theories, power dynamics and patriarchy, hair, and forms of cultural production, to name a few. Conceived on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at M HKA, Antwerp, the publication collects 142 drawings realized between 2013 and 2023. The essays by Calla Henkel and Mark von Schlegell accompany the images, projecting the reader into a fictional dimension interwined with Shaw's practice, relying on his drawings as a backdrop of territories, scenes, characters, and ideas onto which they could project their own narrative.