Jim Shaw, The Potato Family (2018), via Metro Pictures

Currently on view at Metro Pictures, artist Jim Shaw returns to New York with a series of five new paintings, united under the name The Family Romance.  Continuing the artist’s penchant for blending personal, political, and surreal narratives, the show traces Shaw’s interests in behavioral psychology and themes surrounding the family unit. (more…)

Jim Shaw (Installation View), all images via Metro Pictures

In his current show at Metro Pictures, artist Jim Shaw presents a group of new paintings, sculptures, and drawings—all from 2017. The show is the first in the city since his survey The End is Here was presented at the New Museum in 2015. Shaw’s work often mixes American cultural references with comic books, art history, religion, Greek mythology and his own subconscious. Suffice it to say that in the time that has passed since his New Museum. exhibition the political and social climate in America has undergone an upheaval. For this new show Shaw combines his usual brand of dark humor with themes of materialism, war and corruption in works that speak to the current state of affairs in America, post-presidential election.
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Robert Longo, Untitled (Bodyhammer: 9mm) (2008), via Art Observed

Few writers have walked such a fine line between coy observations of modernity and the possible dystopian future that lay just under the surface of daily life in the way that writer J.G. Ballard had over the course of his more than fifty years of writing.  Mixing a playful sense of imagination with dark and disturbing meditations on the state of the world, the writer’s work continues to serve as a major inspiration for artists and philosophers in the 21st century, just as some of the futuristic conditions he so often described have begun to manifest themselves in the real world. (more…)

Jerry Saltz writes on the Jim Shaw exhibition this week, putting the artist’s work in the context of the generation of painters that followed him, and emphasizing his impact on the work of the early 1990’s.  “Even if he wasn’t able to make it to the blue-chip promised land that awaited many of these other artists, Shaw blew open the doors of painting. And the New Museum has made it even easier to see how pivotal Shaw is by going the extra mile,” he writes. (more…)

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Jim Shaw is profiled in the New York Times this week, in advance of his retrospective opening at the New Museum this month.  “Jim has always been very important and influential to me because of the way he blurs the distinction between insider art and outsider art, which is something I’ve been involved with for a long time,” says Massimiliano Gioni. (more…)

Forcefield, Meerk Puffy Autumn Shroud (2002), via Art Observed

Over the past half century, American art has distinguished itself as much for its formal heroes (Pollock, de Kooning, Judd, etc.) as its outliers, artists working along distinct threads of the abject, pop culture and mass production who challenged the more refined and neatly conceptualized exercises of the 20th Century avant-garde.  This separate thread of American art, running from 1960’s comic-book art through the punk and funk movements of the 1970’s and onwards through the chaotic energies of turn of the century performance and video are the subject of What Nerve!, a documentation of the American underground at Matthew Marks. (more…)

Inside the LA Art Book Fair, via Art Observed

Despite its size and immense popularity, the LA Art Book Fair is only two years old. Originally a New York function based out in MoMA’s PS1 satellite location, the dramatic growth of the fair has led to a second location across the country . Conceived by artist AA Bronson and Printed Matter, the Book Fair is not necessarily art-world exclusive, aiming to continue Printed Matter’s dedication to the “dissemination, understanding and appreciation of artists’s books.” Indeed, respected art world publishers such as Mörel Books and Primary Information were in attendance, but one of the primary concentrations of the LA Book Fair once again focused on the grassroots, DIY zines that gave voice to subculture interests on the fringe of the arts community from the 1970’s until today.

LA Art Book Fair, via Art Observed

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Jim Shaw (Installation View), via Simon Lee

On view at London’s Simon Lee Gallery is a solo exhibition of eclectic new works by Los Angeles-based, American artist Jim Shaw. A California Institute of the Arts graduate and longtime L.A. resident, Shaw’s works highlight the anxieties and triumphs of  late capitalist society, phantasmic religion and the shamanic, mythical world of his dream life. This idiosyncratic body of work utilizes comic book aesthetic in pencil drawings and groupings of sculptures juxtaposed against new painted and drawn portraits of unhinged and broken body parts, which engender a distinct unease in the viewer.  

Jim Shaw, Oden’s Broken Staff and Emerald City Asgard (2013), via Simon Lee

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Peter Saul, Francis Bacon Descending a Staircase (2012), via Mary Boone

Defying critical characterization and classification for the bulk of their careers, artists Jim Shaw and Peter Saul have continually pushed the art of figurative drawing in new directions.  Exploring the multi-generational impact of these two artists, curator Klaus Kertess has brought the two artists together at Mary Boone New York to exhibit a selection of their works on paper.  Bringing the subconscious to the forefront of the viewer’s attention, the artists’ show is packed with images of altered realities, presented in their trademark styles.

Jim Shaw, Dream Drawing (1996), via Mary Boone

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Jim Shaw, Untitled (US Presidents), 2006, Courtesy of the artist and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

The Baltic Centre in Gateshead is currently holding the first-ever retrospective of works by American Jim Shaw outside the United States. Including over one hundred works in a variety of media, from video and sculpture to paintings and installations, the show explores Shaw’s ongoing examination of American life, and his unique set of aesthetic signifiers at play throughout his career.

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Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Carpinteros, Kosmaj Toy (2012).

All images by A.M. Ekstrand for ArtObserved, on location at Art Basel Miami Beach Fair.

Art Basel returned once again in Miami Beach this past week for the 11th annual Art Basel Miami Beach Fair. Featuring over 300 galleries representing 36 countries around the world, the show has exhibited marked growth from last year’s event, with well over 2,000 artists flocking to exhibit at what has become the internationally-renowned closing party for the world art market each year.  It is of course always an irony that tens of thousands will fly down for the events and parties, with many of them never visiting the vast aggregation of what it said to be roughly $1.5 billion worth of art in one (large) room, a collection that few museums in the world could compete with.   Below is a selection of some of the works we thought to be notable from the fair.

Helly Nahmad Gallery, Mark Rothko No. 1 (1957) and Alexander Calder, installation view

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Jim Shaw, The Rinse Cycle (2012). All photos on site for Art Observed by Ilhan Kim.

Jim Shaw’s oeuvre maximizes a medley of mediums straddling low art found in a church’s Christmas bazaar to high art befitting a gem gallery. Shaw’s latest exhibition at Metro Pictures continues his tradition of weaving together disparate motifs to create textured compositions with multiple references to American history and a wild reimagining of world religions and mythology. The installation showcases various elements of a narrative trajectory in which two petty thieves, on the run from FBI agents in pursuit, trespass into the fictional Museum of Oist History in Omaha and don wigs that cloak them invisible and deport them to the ancient birthplace of O, the founding deity of Oism.

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Jim Shaw, Cake (Jim Head Clutch) (2010), via Patrick Painter

Patrick Painter, Inc presents a new exhibition of works by Jim Shaw, surrealist multimedia artist at their Santa Monica location. Currently included in this new exhibition entitled “CAKES, MEN IN PAIN, WHITE RECTANGLES, DEVIL IN THE DETAILS” are several large-scale works that include dual canvases and a multitude of working art media.  This new show serves to take a personal and experiential view of two dimensional artwork. Like many of his other exhibitions,  this show features many works that rely on unique and personal material from Shaw’s own intimate history and subconscious.

More text and images after the jump…

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Masters of the Universe, Tim Noble & Sue Webster (1998-2000). All photographs by Oskar Proctor for ArtObserved.

“Skin Fruit,” the much-anticipated, Jeff Koons­-curated exhibition featuring million-dollar works by the biggest names in contemporary art continues at the New Museum through June 6, 2010. The New Museum’s questionable decision to exhibit works from the collection of one of its trustees, Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou, resulted in an art world controversy that threatened to upstage the show itself from the very beginning. When a large mix of celebrities and art-world-insiders flooded the Museum for the opening reception – attendees included Cyndi Lauper, U2’s the Edge, and collectors Don and Mera Rubell – the irony of placing the ritzy collection in a museum that was once championed for its promotion of the underdog was only exaggerated. And the critics responded accordingly. Christian Viveros-Fauné lambasted that the show is totally wrong for our times “in just about every possible way.” According to the exhibition press release, the featured works by Franz West, Charles Ray, Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, Robert Gober, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Maurizio Cattelan, Tauba Auerbach, Chris Ofili, Dan Colen and Terence Koh, amongst others, aim to “evoke the tensions between exterior and interior, between what we see and what we consume” – a curatorial spin critics say was invented in an effort to disguise a “rudderless display of art as trophy hunting” as an art exhibition. While this may be true, Skin Fruit essentially offers the common man an opportunity to view important works from one of the finest and most original collections of contemporary art in the world that have rarely, or never been seen in New York.

Revolution Counter-Revolution, Charles Ray (1990/2010)

Photo-essay and full round-up of links after the jump….
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Dinner with Donner Party: Jim Shaw’s Cannibal Exhibition [P.S. 1 Gallery]

Marianne Boesky and the Big Bad World of Art Business [Portfolio]