Jim Shaw
Dreams
13 September–22 December 2012
BFAS Blondeau Fine Art Services
5, rue de la Muse
CH-1205 Geneva, Switzerland
T +41 22 544 95 95
F +41 22 544 95 99
www.bfasblondeau.com
Subscribe to our E-news
Until the 22nd of December, BFAS Blondeau Fine Art Services is delighted to present an exhibition by the American artist Jim Shaw at its space, 5 rue de la Muse in Geneva.
In this exhibition, the spectator discovering Shaw’s series Dream Drawings/Dream Objects for the first time is invited to take the plunge into a sometimes outsize world replete with imponderables and phantasmagoria.
Waking in the middle of the night to sketch in the dark or record fragments of his dreams on a dictaphone, Shaw sets himself the challenge of restoring his dreams in order to render them permanent, as he has often said:
“Since the 1990s, I had been working on a project to record and render my dreams, striving to make many of the artworks I had encountered in those dreams. This set off an odd cycle of dreaming. I started drawing dreams, working full time to make the art objects come true.” [1]
The artist therefore sets down his elucubrations on paper in the form of strip cartoons. On the back of each page, he writes in almost telegraphic fashion the textual precipitate of his dream, which, as often as not, belongs to the further reaches of the wild yarn.
Later, the objects emerge from that page. Certain subjects, discovered in his unconscious, come to life: the dream becomes a physical reality and the aesthetic frontier between fiction and materiality is attenuated.
We are delighted to present for the first time in Europe Dream Object – ‘By the garage was a big Ganesha statue…’ (2001). Twice exhibited in the United States, this, the most monumental sculpture of the series, takes up its autumn quarters in our exhibition space.
In this work, Jim Shaw incarnates himself in the Indian divinity Ganesha, imposing his own self portrait on the obese body of the elephant-headed god. A vision of a delusive temple guardian, like Marlon Brando in the final scene of Apocalypse Now—or a creative genius on a par with the Almighty (Shaw would not be the first artist in history to represent himself in Messianic fashion)? Your call…
The work of Jim Shaw has been widely exhibited in important European and US institutions. His first retrospective was held at the Casino Luxembourg and Geneva’s MAMCO in 1999/2000. His series of Distorted Faces and Portraits was shown in our gallery in 2007. The series Left Behind was the focus of a major exhibition in the nave of the CAPC, Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in May 2010. And last March, Metro Pictures in New York presented a Shaw body of work consecrated to a religion named “Oism”.
Born in Midland (Michigan) in 1952, Jim Shaw lives and works in Los Angeles.
Press packs and HD illustrations will be available on request: muse [at] bfasblondeau.com
[1] J. Shaw, Jim Shaw. Dream Object Book, Bruxelles 2011, n.p.
