Jim Shaw b. 1952

Linda Cathcart Gallery, Santa Monica
Compass Rose, Chicago

This work was created during the period when the artist was accumulating pictures purchased in thrift stores and swap-meets (for $20 or less), which he organized into the 1991 exhibition at Metro Pictures, New York, "Thrift Store Paintings".  Jerry Saltz, reviewing a similar show two years later in the Village Voice, ventured that the Shaw exhibition 'was one of the most important shows of the decade' because it presented 'scores of dead, forgotten, or otherwise devalued painting genres' which furnished a context, of sorts, for a group of artists just then emerging, including Karen Kilimnik, Elizabeth Peyton, Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin.