Art Review: Jim Shaw: ‘I Only Wanted You to Love Me’

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Ken Johnson

Jim Shaw’s “Wedding of the Ear” (2013), with the DC superhero the Flash and the
Land O’Lakes butter princess. Credit Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures

NEW YORK---The uncannily imaginative Los Angeles painter and sculptor Jim Shaw has what the Romantic poet John Keats called negative capability: the ability to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The mural-size “Wedding of the Ear,” one of this thrilling show’s biggest and most metaphorically complex pieces, brings together all of Mr. Shaw’s best qualities. As in the show’s other works, these characters are rendered on a beautiful old theater backdrop: in this case, a 20-foot wide swath of unstretched muslin bearing the image of a medieval chapel. [link]

JIM SHAW
‘I Only Wanted You to Love Me’
Metro Pictures
519 West 24th Street, Chelsea
Through Oct. 25