9 NOVEMBER 2012 - 17 FEBRUARY 2013
Los Angeles-based Jim Shaw is one of America’s most important and prolific contemporary artists. Part of a ground-breaking group including Mike Kelley, John Miller and Tony Oursler that graduated from California Institute of the Arts in the late 1970s, Shaw has one of the most distinctive visual imaginations of his generation. The Rinse Cycle is the first ever full-scale survey of Shaw’s work internationally and will bring together more than one hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings and videos from the last twenty-five years.
An accompanying exhibition of Jim Shaw's collection of found thrift store paintings also tales place at BALTIC 39, Newcastle.
Shaw’s work is informed by his enduring fascination with the imagery of popular culture, art history, politics, religion and myth, as well as his own unconscious mind. Drawing from these different sources he makes work in distinct series that often take years to complete and represented together for the first time in this exhibition. Shaw’s alter-ego, dreams and fictitious religion ‘Oism’ will be represented alongside monumental banner paintings that reveal a schizoid vision of America. Collectively, these works prove Shaw to be one of the most enquiringand influential artists working today, dissecting the fractured natureof contemporary visual culture and the popular imagination at anunprecedented level.
The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication and a limited edition printavailable from BALTIC SHOP.
Visit Jim Shaw: My Mirage microsite.