Jim Shaw

Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings (all 2015) by Los Angeles based artist Jim Shaw. Material wealth, innocence and guilt, man's relationship with nature and religious fanaticism all come under fire in Shaw’s new paintings. Mining and splicing American histories, mythologies, children’s stories, images from advertising, cartoons and his personal memories and collections, Shaw’s seductive, darkly comic works invite us to reflect on social and economic power systems and subjugation. Like the monumental backdrop paintings first shown in the exhibition 'Left Behind' in 2010 at CAPC, Bordeaux, these new works are painted over used theatrical scenic backdrops bought by the artist. Now cut down and stretched, these readymade canvases are typically from the 1940s and 1950s, and carry with them a sense of the history of that time. That sense of the past is combined with the imagery Shaw uses for the works -...