Artist: Jim Shaw

I’m drawn towards things that are weird—that show you something about America.
- Jim Shaw

Gagosian presents 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.

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 a 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.

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.

The artist will be 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.