M HKA Ensembles

Over the past five decades, Jim Shaw has developed a complex and exhilarating artistic practice that includes photographs, drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, films, and musical performances. The sheer number of works produced by the artist is not only daunting but also highly inspiring, as it affirms the power of culture as a regenerative and ever-evolving creative force in its own right.

Having earned cult status all the while working from the perspective of a male, middle-class WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), Jim Shaw is unquestionably a leading figure on the Californian art scene and is one of the most influential North American artists of our time. Like no other, he has given shape to a resolutely cathartic body of work that thrives at the intersection of the fictional and the real, the individual and the collective. Continuously driven by doubt and faith, Jim Shaw has developed a critical and speculative relationship with the United States society of which he is the product, while simultaneously unfolding his art practice within it. The very mythologies that have forged American society, such as religion, music, popular beliefs, the entertainment industry, advertising, and even conspiracy theories, serve as inspiration, subject matter, and raw material for the artist. As such, Shaw blurs not only the boundaries of artistic creation but also those of the personal and collective responsibilities at the source of the narrative flow we call ‘culture’: the complex human activity that gives meaning to and normalises our lives.

Since the early seventies, Jim Shaw has never stopped dreaming, organizing, distorting, and distilling his thoughts. Bolstered by an encyclopaedic knowledge, the artist is both a creator and a fervent consumer of the cultures and countercultures that shape the context he evolves in: comic books, monster magazines, Hollywood cinema, art history, punk music, psychedelic posters, caricatures, and amateur art. He gained recognition with works deployed in the form of dreamt and imaginary narrative cycles.

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